Friday, August 26, 2005

Canada's First Internment Camps

CANADA'S RACIST HISTORY OF EXPLOITATION
OF IMMIGRANT WORKERS

"Ukrainian and other internees at the Castle Mountain Alberta internment camp in 1915"

PM reaches out to Ukrainians
Ottawa to spend $2.5-million to mark internment of citizens in First World War
Thursday, August 25, 2005

There were 24 internment camps across Canada, including ones in Vernon, Banff, Jasper, Brandon and Kapuskasing, Ont. Some camps housed only men, while others, like the large Spirit Lake camp, held women and children, too. The camps provided a cheap way of clearing land, benefiting government and private industry at the expense of second-class immigrants, and reduced unemployment in cities.Workers were meant to be paid 20 to 30 cents a day, but many didn't get their money. "Nine holes of the Banff Springs golf course was hacked out of the bush with this slave labour," Hladyshevsky said.

It's been a long time coming, the UCCLA has been lobbying for two decades to get this wrong addressed. Chretien could have done it back in 1997 or 98, 99, etc etc.

"The Liberal Party understands your concern ... we support your efforts to secure the redress of Ukrainian-Canadians' claims arising from their internment and loss of freedoms during the First World War ... we will continue to monitor the situation closely and seek to ensure that the government honours its promise." Jean Chretien, Leader of the Liberal Opposition, June 8 1993.

Request to the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister
of Canadian Heritage, the Honourable Sheila Copps, MP
by the Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association
24 January 1997



Before they interned the Japanese, the Canadian Government interned first and second wave Ukrainian immigrant. They did this creating the War Measures Act supposedly because Ukrainian immigrants were from Austro-Hungarian Empire and thus 'enemy aliens'. The real story is that they were interned for being communists, socialists, and labour radicals.

To this date it has not been determined what was the driving force for the Internment. Was it due to wartime xenophobia and war fever, or the Economic benefits of a forced-labour system, or bigoted-driven emotions against Canada's first non-Official language speaking immigrants? The truth is that it was probably due to mixture of these reasons. Unfortunately, the War Measures Act formed the basis for future government incursions on the Civil liberties of Citizens and immigrants to Canada. This act was used as the basis of the internment of the Japanese Canadians in 1941 and the French-Canadians (or Quebecois) in 1970. This act was always implemented via an Order in Council, rather than through approval via the democratically elected parliament. This Act was first implemented during World War I where Ukrainian Canadians were primarly and unjustly made it's first victims.
Internment of Ukrainians in Canada 1914-1920

The internment and arrests coincided with the Canadian Government banning the Industrial Workers of the World, IWW, as an illegal alien organization set to overthrow the government. The War Measures Act was used against the Wobblies and other labour activists. While in the United States, they passed the Criminal Syndicalist Act to ban the IWW, who were in outspoken opposition to Imperialist War.

Anti Immigrant rhetoric was used to cover up the fact that immigrant workers in Western Canada were organizing for their rights, whether those workers were Ukrainian, Italian, German, Slovian, Jews, Icelanders,English, Scots or Irish, etc. Racism against non-English speaking immigrants was virulent, all dark skinned Eastern and Central European workers (being peasants or farmworkers) were called 'niggers', by their English bosses. Ukrainians and other Eastern Europeans were called 'Bohunks'.


In Alberta many of the Ukrainians along with other new immigrants, Italians, Finns, Hungarians, Germans, etc. worked in the the dark primitive coalmines in order to get wages to clear the homesteads they farmed. Homesteads that they had been promised by the CPR and Canadian government in order to open up the West. They had also been promised NO TAXES and NO CONSCRIPTION, both of which were reneged on by the Borden Conservative Government in 1917. This was why Peter Kropotkin advised the Russian Anabaptist Community, the Duhkobours to come to Canada, as pacifists they were being persecuted by the Tsar for refusal to fight in the Cimean War and WWI. The Duhkobours moved to Saskatchewan and B.C.

Between 1906-1919 Alberta along with B.C. was a hotbed of labour organizing in the mining and forestry industries. And it was the 'foriegn workers' who organized usually under the leadership of English trade unionists.

New immigrants helped fuel a growing militancy in the labour movement. These men and women had come to Canada seeking a better life, but many found their success hampered by anti-immigrant sentiment and unscrupulous employers. Under these circumstances, they found it necessary to either organize their own unions or join other groups that promised to promote their interests.

Ukrainian
Jewish

The dissatisfaction with the quality of life in Canada experienced by some Ukrainians forced them to express their frustration in a variety of ways.

"The only salvation from despair was drama and singing groups, and socialist and union organizing."

Excerpt from: No Streets of Gold: A Social History of Ukrainians in Alberta, Helen Potrebenko (Vancouver: New Star Books, 1977).

"Their expectations were low, revolving around work and survival. Indeed, they were preoccupied with survival.... They were willing to work long hours and endure much discomfort if it allowed them security and a viable future for their offspring. They settled for the concept of 'limited good,' but if their modest stipulations were not met, they reacted in a variety of mutinous ways."

Excerpt from: Peasant in the Promised Land: Canada and the Ukrainains 1891-1914, Jaroslav Petryshyn (Toronto: Lorimer, 1985)

Established trade unions under the American Federation of Labour discriminated against them as unskilled immigrants, with the same racist attitudes as the bosses. The Ukrainians and other immigrants found a more sympathetic union in the IWW and later in the One Big Union (OBU)

In addition, many coal miners saw their conditions as the direct result of capitalism and the systemic exploitation of the working classes. This group of militants envisioned “One Big Union” (OBU) to protect their interests. Thus, labour organization would shift from one based on a “craft” or trade to one based on all workers in all industries coming together. At the forefront were the coal miners of District 18 of the UMWA, which comprised western Canada. They wanted to withdraw from the UMWA and set up their own district—District 1, Mining Department, OBU. The UMWA tried to crush this splinter movement and in the period 1919-20 there were a number of strikes and lockouts. It was an idealistic attempt to get workers to see their commonalities rather than differences but was doomed to failure by entrenched craft and trade thinking dating back to the Middle Ages.

In addition, the Winnipeg General Strike, which began in May 1919, set off other strikes in support. Edmonton and Calgary both saw strikes and, in August 1919, violence broke out in Drumheller. Strikebreakers, drawn from returning veterans, attacked the miners and their homes. The miners, largely immigrants, were OBU supporters. When Coal Was King


This was the first interment, after the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919, anti- immigrant anti-bolshevik editorials advised the government of the day to deport the foriegn born Bolsheviks, 'enemy aliens'. Again Ukrainians were deported.

Shortly after the strike began, Winnipeg's most influential manufacturers, bankers and politicians created the Citizens' Committee of 1000 to oppose the action. Winnipeg's leading newspapers published allegations that the strike was initiated by a small group of "alien scum"—European workers and Bolsheviks. Thus, management waged a public relations war by stereotyping the working class as dangerous foreigners—a ploy that proved successful.
The Famous Five.


In the 1920's the Communist Party of Canada was declared illegal, and again Ukrainians, Finns, etc. were deported as foriegn agents of Bolshevism.

The Internment and deportation of Ukrainians was poltical, tinged with the usual anti-immigrant rhetoric. The reality was it was an aspect of the class war in Western Canada that threatened the ruling class and its government in Ottawa.

The practice of Internment was introduced during the Boer War, which Canadian Military Historians see as Canada's first real involvement in a Foriegn War, usually with great fanfare and cheers of our coming of age. The British developed the internment camps for the Boers in South Africa but Canada perfected it.

The Boer War was a first in many ways for Canada. It was the first time we sent troops abroad. It was the first time French and English Canada fought over sending troops overseas, and it was a time when the Canadian military discovered Canadians are not born soldiers, but must be trained like everyone else."For the first time Canadians realized that war is destructive, chaotic and messy. In wars people do get killed," says Granatstein.
Canada's first war a fading memory



Internment was used as an economic measure as much as it was a political one, without the 'slave labour' of the Ukrainian internees there would be NO NATIONAL PARKS IN THE ROCKIES. Banff and Jasper as national tourist resorts were built by the slave labour of the Ukrainian internees.

Life in the internment camps was often harsh, and the lives of the prisoners were often consid­ered expendable to many of their guards. In Canmore and Banff the in­terred prisoners were used to help build roads, create the golf course in Banff , and work the mines in Canmore.
Two camps were set up between 1915 and 1917 in what is now Banff National Park . The Cave and Basin camp area near the Banff townsite was used in the winter, and the other at Cas­tle Mountain , was used during the summer months.
INTERNMENT CAMPS PART OF BANFF HISTORY
BY JACKIE GOLD FOR THE BANFF CRAG & CANYON

A excellent book documenting the Ukrainian internees building of Canada's two most famous national parks is: In the Shadow of the Rockies: Diary of the Castle Mountain Internment Camp, 1915-1917, Edmonton: CIUS Press, 1991

For a great labour/social history of Ukrainians in Alberta see:
Potrebenko, Helen, No Streets of Gold: A Social History of Ukrainians in Alberta (1977) New Star Books. out of print

In the Shadow of the Rockies / As I Walk Through Canada
© Maria Dunn, 2001 SOCAN / Traditional Ukrainian, Public Domain


Growing up in Alberta with the Rockies as a favourite holiday destination, I only learned about the WWI internment of Ukrainian Canadians in the national parks on a trip to Jasper in Spring 2000. There, I came across Bill Waiser's book, Park Prisoners. Shortly afterwards, I read In the Shadow of the Rockies: Diary of the Castle Mountain Internment Camp, 1915-1917 by Bodhan Kordan & Peter Melnycky. When war broke out in 1914, Galicia was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Ukrainian immigrants (often referred to as "Galicians" in the early 1900s) became "enemy aliens" in Canada, the very place that had actively encouraged their immigration. Ironically, most of them viewed their former Austro-Hungarian rulers not with loyalty, but as occupiers and exploiters of their Ukrainian homeland.

For more information, see the Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association website: www.uccla.ca

***

Young stranger, as you walk these trails of beauty
And you feel the mountain air caress your face
As you play in the shadow of the rockies
Remember who toiled in this place
Please remember who toiled in this place


They courted our labour and called us to settle
The great Canadian plains
But how fickle the love of a fair young Alberta
For her enemy aliens

Oh pity the young man in 1914
Who hadn't a job or a trade
And doubly so the man from Galicia
For he was soon detained

Our invisible hands worked in nature's cathedral
For the pleasure of tourist and town
Six days a week at slavery's wages
Still we were not wanted around

In a camp that lay beneath Castle Mountain
Rotten food and sodden tents
The most glorious place in the world is ugly
When seen through a barbed wire fence

Our footsteps and voices have long since faded
From these pristine forest paths
Yet many's the mile and the hour we trudged here
To our place of labour and back

If you listen, young stranger, the wind in the pines
Or the water over the stones
You may hear the songs we sang to each other
To remind us of our homes

***

Ethnomusicologist and musician Brian Cherwick chose the traditional Ukrainian tune that follows the CD version of In the Shadow of the Rockies and performs it on tsymbaly. "As I Walk Through Canada" is taken from a field recording made by Robert B. Klymasz of a song sung by Mrs. M. Baraensky, Mrs. G. Kuprowsky and Mrs. S. Stjaharj in Sheho, Saskatchewan, 1964. It was published in Klymasz's An Introduction to the Ukrainian-Canadian Immigrant Folksong Cycle, Folklore Series 8. Ottawa: National Museum of Canada. Brian has provided an English translation of the lyrics here:

As I walk through Canada, I count the miles, (2)
Wherever nightfall finds me, there I bed down.
Hej-ja-hej, there I bed down.

I spent the night in a wood, in a green wood, (2)
Over there my young wife is crying for me.
Hej-ja-hej, my young wife.

My young wife and my young children, (2)
I came to Canada in search of happiness.
Hej-ja-hej, in search of happiness.

On a high hill the grass does sway, (2)
Somewhere my beloved is writing a letter to me.
Hej-ja-hej, is writing a letter.

She writes it in fine, delicate script, (2)
When I read it, I washed myself in tears.
Hej-ja-hej, washed myself in tears.

I waited for a letter for a month and an hour, (2)
I never received the letter from my family.
Hej-ja-hej, from my family.

O Canada, Canada, how deceitful you are, (2)
You have separated many a husband from his wife,
Hej-ja-hej, from his wife.

Photo in CD Liner Notes: Prisoners of war at internment camp, Castle Mountain, Alberta, 1915, Glenbow NA-3959-2

Written as part of an Artist Residency with the Edmonton District Labour Council; funding support from Alberta Foundation for the Arts

Sources used in writing this song:
Kordan, B.S. & Melnycky, P. (1991). In the Shadow of the Rockies: Diary of the Castle Mountain Internment Camp, 1915-1917. Canadian Institute of the Canadian Studies Press: University of Alberta, Edmonton.
Waiser, B. (1995). Park prisoners: The Untold Story of Western Canada's National Parks, 1915-1946. Fifth House: Calgary.
Doskoch, W.H. (2001). Oral history interview by Alberta Labour History Institute. Unpublished.
Doskoch, W.H. (1993). Strait from the Heart: Biography of W (Bill) Doskoch, 1893 - 1941. Self-published.


At the same time as the internment was happening to the Ukrainians the Canadian Government and its mercantilist ruling class which owned the CPR were using Chinese labourers to finish building the railway. They imposed a head tax on Chinese workers, to stop them from immigrating to Canada. They were ok for forced labour at cheap wages, another reason the IWW attempted to organize these workers on the railway, but they were not good enough to become Canadians. And like the Ukrainian Internee campaign, the Chinese Redress campaign has been going on for over two decades.

The Chinese Immigration Act of 1885, 1900, and 1903 were a series of anti-Chinese legislations in Canada that were meant to discourage Chinese from entering Canada after the completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway. These legislations are examples of institutional racism against the Chinese in Canada.The Government of Canada collected well over $23 million from about 82000 head tax payers, some of the money were used to support Canada's war effort in World War I.
Head Tax

Chinese Head Tax & Exclusion Act Redress in Canada
In 1909, Dere's grandfather arrived in Canada only to hand over $500 to the government for simply being Chinese. Now, a special United Nations rapporteur is urging the Canadian government to pay back the money owed to Dere and thousands of other Chinese immigrants and their families who were forced to pay the so-called Chinese head tax.

It was July 15, 1921 when the "Controller of Chinese Immigration" clerk scrawled his signature on the head-tax receipt for Mah Ming Sun, who would take the Canadian name Wally. He and his uncle had just disembarked a steamer from Canton, China. Wally's father had scraped together enough as a labourer building the railroad near Revelstoke, B.C., to pay their passage and the tax. The white children taunted him at school in Kelowna, B.C. "Chink-Chong Chinaman," they would jeer.

The labour movement in Canada never forgot the internment and exploitation of Canada's immigrant working class.

When the depression hit in the 1930's the Government of the day, again the Conservatives this time under Prime Minister R. B. Bennet from Alberta, used internment camps to deal with mass unemployment. They called them 'Relief camps' and rather than providing unemployment benefits all able bodied single men were shipped out of Western Canada's cities, to once again work in forced labour camps under the watchful eye of the Canadian Army and RCMP.

Mass unemployment affected every advanced industrial country in the world, and in response the most radical activists in the labour and farmers movement, usually the communists and anarchists, organized mass Hunger Marches of the unemployed demanding unemployment payments, veterans payments, and farm subsidies.

In Western Canada Hunger Marches were held and were brutally repressed by police assaults ordered by the provincial governments of the day. Including the famous battle of the Evergreens in Edmonton in the winter of 1932. The outrage of the citizens at being attacked by their own government, the United Farmers of Alberta, with the support of the Mayor and city council who were all trade unionists and members of the Edmonton Trades and Labour Council, led to the defeat of the electoral left in Alberta and the rise to power of the Social Credit party.

See:
Labour/Le Travail 16, Fall 1985. Special Issue on Labour in Alberta

Alberta law cases #3-5 - "The Hunger March of 1932"(audio mp3)
In December 1932 unemployed men from all around the prairies congregated in Edmonton. The purpose? - to participate in a ""Hunger March"" to the Alberta Legislature to raise awareness of their desperate situation. A clash between marchers and police resulted in the arrest of 29 participants.

We Were Good People
© Maria Dunn & William Dolinsky, 2003 SOCAN


The Edmonton Hunger March took place on Tuesday, December 20, 1932. Protesters planned to walk in an orderly and peaceful manner from Market Square (currently the Stanley Milner Public Library) to the Legislature to ask for government assistance for farmers and the unemployed in the midst of the Depression. Wielding billy clubs, police on horseback broke up the march. In researching this event, I read an unpublished letter to the Edmonton Journal, written by William Dolinsky in 1999, in which he described the events he had witnessed. He wrote: "I remember well this Bloody Tuesday" and asserted, so eloquently and simply: "We were good people". Of the 10,000 people reportedly in the square that day, I imagined the debacle from the point of view of a mother with two children.

***

I was an ordinary mother in 1932
My husband out of work and more worries here than food
I was weary with asking the man for relief
Feeling like a beggar, being treated like a thief

So when word of a protest started going round
I bundled my boys for the long walk downtown
And bless them, they didn't make a peep about the cold
One was only 5, the other 9 years old

We were good people, gathered in the square
It wasn't ease and comfort had driven us there


Well the air was almost festive with Christmas trees in view
But as we moved to leave the square and march the Avenue
A sound I'd never heard before turned my heart to lead
The sound of a billy club cracking open heads

Well I'd always taught my sons we were safe around police
But when they charged on horses, I dragged us off the street
It made me so angry they'd endanger children too
In silencing the voices of 1932

We were good people, gathered in the square
It wasn't ease and comfort had driven us there
But they treated us like criminals for showing our despair
Oh I remember well this Bloody Tuesday


Where was the government who wouldn't let us starve?
Who wouldn't take the farmer's land, who knew we worked so hard
We, the people, were just scraping by for our daily bread
We had voted for the cowards and away they turned their heads

Now I've read it in the paper, this supposed "Hunger March"
Was the scheme of Reds, they said, our hunger was a farce
Well I don't care what they say, for me it did ring true
An ordinary mother in 1932

Again the leadership in Alberta of the mass movement was Ukrainans in the Worker Farmer Unity League. Several were arrested and tried for inciting a riot and seditious insurrection.

By 1935 a mass movement of labour activism across the west, mobilized the
On to Ottawa trek, it emptied the relief camps of thousands of workers, who then hopped on trains, the CPR again, and were brutally attacked by the CPR police, as well as by the RCMP as they attempted to 'march on Ottawa' to demand an end to internment and demand Unemployment Insurance. They were stopped in Regina where they were met with brutal repression by the RCMP.

The On-to-Ottawa Trek

The On-To-Ottawa-Trek 1935
Courtesy of the Glenbow Collection

Alberta experienced its greatest period of social and economic crisis during the 1930s, better known as the "Dirty Thirties." Trigger by Europe's cut in Canadian food imports the Depression saw wheat prices plunge and that combined with a drought that destroyed many family farms. Railways and mines cut back on their operations and shop laid off employees. Both rural and urban communities were in crisis sending many families to seek relief aid from the government to keep from starving. Many unemployed men began wandering the country, riding the train boxcars, looking for any kind of work. A number of these men ended up working in government relief camps that were no better than hard labour internment camps.

Riding the boxcars to Regina
Courtesy of the Glenbow Collection

The men resented these harsh conditions and organized the Communist-led Relief Camp Workers Union of the Worker’s Unity League organised the On-to-Ottawa-Trek in 1935. Unemployed single men left the relief camps of British Columbia in June on board east-bound trains. The marchers halted at Regina when its leader, Arthur Evans (a former OBU organizer), and others went to Ottawa to express their grievances to Prime Minister R. B. Bennett. Having little sympathy for the protesters, Bennett ordered the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to ambush the protesters and force them to return to the relief camps. Bennett’s order resulted in the Regina Riot of 1 July 1935. Disappointed, 1250 of the protesters volunteered for the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion to fight for the Spanish Republic during the Spanish Civil War. At least 25 of these men were from Alberta. Many of the Spanish Civil War veterans returned to offer their battle experience to the Canadian Armed Forces and fought as heroes during World War II.



Internment was again used in World War II. It was used as a racist reaction against Japanese Canadian. The first internment had been against Ukrainians because of our language and cultural differences which in itself was racism by the English ruling class. In the case of the Japanese it was because they were a visble minority.


Once the bombing on Pearl Harbour happened racism came to a head. British Columbians started to blame all their troubles and problems on the Japanese. Japanese people were blamed for everything from a bad crop to a flat tire. The scared people of BC cried out, wanting the BC Government to deal with the problem as they saw it-Japanese Canadians. The people of British Columbia wanted to feel safe in their homes again and they wanted Prime Minister Mackenzie King to rid Canada of people of Japanese orign. They were causing a threat to Canada (or so it was believed by the public.) Mackenzie King wanted the votes from B.C. so he was more than happy to do what they asked. Mackenzie's first order of business was to incarcerate all Japanese males between the ages 14 and 45. They were ordered to move more than 160 km inland. This was to "safe guard" the pacific coast from Japanese spies. The Canadian government took away all of the Japanese fishing fleets, in order to protect Canada. The war caused a large labour shortage for farmers, especially sugar beet farmers. The Security Commission Council organized sugar beet projects to combat the labour shortage. This gave the Japanese males a choice. The choice was to work in road camps as slaves or go to the beet camps and be with their families. Working in the beet camps was the choice taken by the majority of Japanese married men.
Japanese Internment Camps

Lethbridge and Southen Alberta boomed with sugar beet production as Japanese families were moved into the province during the war. Once again internment was as much about economics as it was about race and politics. Southern Alberta farmers benefited from the forced labour, and many being former American emigres Mormons in particular, their white racist communities were the perfect location for a visible minority.

Unlike the United States, where families were generally kept together, Canada initially sent its male evacuees to road camps in the B.C. interior, to sugar beet projects on the Prairies, or to internment in a POW camp in Ontario, while women and children were moved to six inland B.C. towns created or revived to house the relocated populace. There the living conditions were so poor that the citizens of wartime Japan even sent supplemental food shipments through the Red Cross. During the period of detention, the Canadian government spent one-third the per capita amount expended by the U.S. on Japanese American evacuees. Not until 1949, four years after Japan had surrendered, were the majority of Nikkei allowed to return to British Columbia. By then most had chosen to begin life anew elsewhere in Canada. Their property had long before been confiscated and sold at a fraction of its worth.
Japanese Canadian Internment
Information at the University of Washington Libraries and Beyond


Today Lethbridge, Warner, Taber, Raymond, Alberta which are the sugar beet centres of Canada, are also home to a large Japanese Canadian community, which grew up there in concentration camps and then made it their home.

Again the use of the 'Concentration Camp', developed by the British but perfected by the Canadian State, was not for keeping prisoners, it was for the extraction of 'Forced Labour', the exploitation of workers. Let us never forget that. And it was used against visible minorities, it was the original source of 'racial profiling'.


Canada's Sad History of Racist Oppression:

Righting wrongs

Ukrainian-Canadians have long sought redress for the internment of 8,579 Eastern Europeans during the First World War, a 'dark chapter' that Prime Minister Paul Martin acknowledged this week. It is one of 13 claims put forward by ethnic and religious groups.

1847 to 1985

In Canada's residential schools, aboriginal children were forced to assimilate and many were abused.

1885 to 1946

Discrimination against immigrants from China, including a $500 head tax.

1891 to 1956

Imprisonment of leprosy patients, mostly Chinese, on two Victoria-area islands.

1900 to 1932

The unjust treatment of black immigrants from the Caribbean.

1914 to 1920

The internment of Ukrainian-Canadians during the First World War.

1938 to 1948

The ban of Jewish immigrants in the mid-20th century, including the time a boat carrying more than 900 German Jews was turned away from a Canadian port in 1939.

1940 to 1943

The internment of Italian-Canadians during the Second World War.

The internment of German-Canadians during the Second World War.

1942 to 1949

The internment and relocation of Japanese-Canadians during and after the Second World War.

Post 1949

The discrimination against aboriginal war veterans, who were offered $20,000 each in compensation in 2002.

OTHER COMMUNITIES

z African-Canadians nationally, including the descendants of black Loyalists, are mobilizing toward a collective claim for reparations.

z In Nova Scotia, the Africville Community is working toward advancing its claims for reparations.

z The Doukhobors, for the forced confinement of children in a sanitorium by the B.C. government.


Today with the so called phoney war on Terrorism, the new security State in Canada is once again threatening the civil liberties of it's citizens and racial profiling those immigrants coming from Muslim countries. Will we see a call for internment of these folks like we have in the past. Not if we are vigilant and learn the lessons of the past. It is up to the labour movement, progressives, Canadians who are concerned about civil liberties and human rights, and most importantly by those communities such as the Ukrainians, Chinese, Japanese, Indigenous peoples, etc. who have been brutalized by the Canadian state to speak out and say loudly and clearly: NEVER AGAIN!

Security certificates
CanWest News Service
OTTAWA - The Supreme Court will decide whether Canada's security certificate policy, which permits non-citizens to be kicked out of the country based on secret evidence that they endanger national security, should be struck down for violating the Charter of Rights and Canada's international commitments.he high court announced yesterday it will hear the appeal of Moroccan-born permanent resident Adil Charkaoui of Montreal, who is accused by immigration authorities of being an al-Qaeda sleeper agent, a charge he denies. Before being granted bail under strict conditions last February, the father of two was detained for 21 months on a security certificate under Canada's immigration laws. Mr. Charkaoui argues the security certificate system is a Kafkaesque violation of his Charter right to a fair hearing and to defend himself because it allows immigration authorities to deport foreign nationals and permanent residents without fully disclosing to them the evidence that allegedly shows that they are a danger to Canadians.

CSIS had concerns over Arar's release
Spy agency felt case was a 'hot potato,' but denies wanting to leave him in Syria
Globe and Mail, Friday, August 26, 2005
Canada's spy agency had concerns about Maher Arar returning to Canada from Syria, but never believed he should remain in a Syrian jail, the second-highest ranking official at CSIS testified yesterday. Jack Hooper, deputy director of the agency, told the Arar inquiry that the Canadian Security Intelligence Service detailed those concerns to the solicitor-general, Foreign Affairs officials and others inside government. Among them: CSIS's ability to deport non-citizens using security certificates could be diminished.



My Grandfather on my mothers side of our family was a miner in Wayne Alberta, and a homesteader. My grandfather on my fathers side was a scholar, the first presbrysterian preacher in the Ukrainian community, a labour activist and helped found the Ukrainian Farmer Labour Temple Association the precursor to the Association of United Ukrainian Canadians.

My partners grandparents and family on her mothers side were Japanese Canadians who were interened during WWII in Warner Alberta. Her grandfather was a Bhuddist priest.

This article is in memory of Comrade George Piche, who passed away July 2005, a tireless fighter for worker and immigrant rights in Canada.

And I would like to thank Maria Dunn for her efforts to document in song the workers history of Alberta.








Wednesday, August 24, 2005

A Slap on the Wrist

No one gets fired from the Ralph Reich. They all piggy up to the trough, say they are sorry, won't do it again and all is well in Alberta Land. Unless you are a social worker or other frontline employee of the Ralph Regime. Then you DO get fired, and have to file for arbitration to get justice.

Alta trade rep in Washington to be reprimanded for taking oil firm board job
Alberta Premier Ralph Klein says he will send the province's trade official in Washington a letter of reprimand for initially accepting a directorship with a junior oil and gas company.
Klein said Wednesday he wants to know if former energy minister Murray Smith accepted a seat on the board of Calgary-based Tusk Energy Corp. before or after being told by the ethics commissioner not to. Stelmach has said the matter is closed as far as he's concerned, and Smith won't be fired from his post in Washington.
Klein said what Smith did was wrong because of the potential conflict of interest, although it wasn't a firing offence.
It's not the first time Smith has raised eyebrows over the job he took late last year.
Figures show he is receiving more than double his old salary as energy minister. It includes $223,000 Cdn in base salary and benefits, a tax-free international service allowance of $21,608, a car, accommodation and other perks.
It was Smith who closed Alberta's trade offices in the mid-1990s as a cost-cutting move when he was economic development minister.

Smith blinks
Alberta's man in Washington resigns from oil firm board
By Rick Bell
Of course, TUSK Energy didn't see a problem. Their head honcho called it a non-issue. Murray didn't think there was a problem. He was Murray, the premier's pal with enough clout to score a cushy post right after retiring from politics and not even having to worry if it's perceived as patronage, an evil Murray once campaigned against.Reining in Murray, the premier's compadre, was tougher."But how did this happen without clearing the appropriate authorities? Here again is a member of the Conservative glitterati who think he's in a world of his own, operating under his own rules. He has got to go. "When it comes to credibility and integrity we have a long way to go across this country, all governments have a way to go," concludes Stelmach, of this baby step.

Nope this government has a lot longer way to go than any other in Canada. Period.

A Little Rae of Sunshine for the Liberals

It's been said that the NDP are Liberals in a hurry. Well it appears that the old canard may have legs. Rumours are abounding in the Press that former NDP Premier of Ontario Bob Rae is being courted by the Federal Liberals to run in the upcoming election next spring. It helps his brother is a long time Liberal backroom boy. And it helps that since he has retired from politics Bob's profile has been kept up with royal commissions, and other public policy work, where he has moved further and further to the centre, making him the ultimate prize for the Liberals.

Strange days as they say, but he proved himself a liberal when he was Premier, and took on the unions and the left of the party with is New Social Contract, which ended up being the prelude to Mike Harris's Common Sense Revolution.
Paul Martin slayed the deficit dragon with cuts to social programs across the board, Bob did the same in Ontario. Birds of a feather.

Heck next the Liberals will be courting Ralph Klein, after all he used to belong to the party. Just kidding. He is retiring from politics, or so he says, we are still waiting with bated breathe for that joyous day.


The public eye bats its lashes at ... Bob Rae
JIM COYLE
Who'd have thought that, at 57, the onetime boy wonder of Canadian politics would find himself being courted by federal Liberals obviously looking beyond the current occupant of the prime minister's office to who might fill it nextAnd who'd have thought Bob Rae would seem so appealingly suited to the task?

Liberals want Rae to join fold
Ex-NDP premier says Air-India his current priority
After that,
The case for a Rae candidacy was bolstered with the release yesterday of a Toronto Star-SES Research Associates poll.It said former New Brunswick premier Frank McKenna, 57, now the Canadian ambassador to Washington, is the frontrunner in the undeclared leadership contest with support of 23 per cent of the 1,000 people surveyed.Rae and former deputy prime minister John Manley, 55, were tied for second at 11 per cent apiece followed by former federal minister Martin Cauchon, 42, and Harvard University professor Michael Ignatieff, 58, at 4 per cent.Among Ontarians polled, 20 per cent favoured Rae compared to 17 per cent who back McKenna.

Taken it to the Man

As I have blogged here before the arguement by the Western Seperatists including the soft right wingers who support Alberta Uber Alles, claiming a constitutional right to mineral & resource rights and defying the idea of sharing the spoils with 'Eastern Bastards" fails to recognize that these land rights are illegal, illegitimate, and based on stolen land and broken promises to Canada's indigenous peoples.

Using their arguement that the 1935 constitutional accords allowed provinces the right to mineral and resource stewardship, justifies Alberta's position of telling Ottawa to bug out when it comes to oil and gas, coal, etc. revenues generated by the province one can then say that earlier legal agreements; treaties, supercede the Alberta governments right to resource revenues.

Link Byfield who I challenged over this is still humming and haaing over the question.

However Stewart Steinhauer, writing in the Dominon in his column, agrees. The Land belongs to the first nations, and they have as much say if not more in who should benefit from the revenues as does the Alberta Government.

Insurgency In Occupied Alberta

A Voice From The Coffin

We're getting down to the heart of the problem, the heartbeat of our Great Mother. Land. The indigenous insurgency in Alberta comes down to a call for Canada to adhere to international law, and recognize Indigenous title to land. The major shareholders and their corporate managers of energy corporations like Exxon Mobil, BP, and Royal Dutch Shell, to name a few, have other ideas, for oily reasons; powerful forces are keeping Canada from following the rule of law.

This distain for the rule of law, when it does not suit the interests of the powerful, is not a new phase in the history of Canada, or of western civilization. I came across a petition signed by my great-great grandfather, Henry Bird Steinhauer, and his son, Arthur, my great grandfather, among others, addressed to Canada's Lieutenant-Governor Archibald, calling for recognition of Indian title to land. The petition, dated 9 January, 1871, reads:

"We as loyal subjects of our Great Mother the Queen whom your Excellency represents, wish that our privileges and claims of the land of our fathers be recognized by Commissioners whom your Excellency may hereafter appoint to treat with the different tribes of the Saskatchewan…our friends the plains Crees, who have not been taught as we have, think that their lands and hunting grounds shall be taken from them without remuneration. As loyal subjects of our Great Mother the Queen, we pray that all the privileges and advantages of such subjects may be granted to us as a People by your Excellency's Government."

Tuesday, August 23, 2005

The Face of Terrorism

Look Ma, Terrorists.
No dear they are homeless
Yeah ma, thats what they want you to think, the guy with the beard is obviously Ben Laden.
No dear, they are poor, out of work, homeless people.
Ya ma and poverty leads to terrorism.
Now dear be nice, and just ignore them.
Ma I am going to have to report you to Homeland Security,
for showing sympathy with our enemies.


Homeless security? U.S. warned of terrorists in disguise
Washington — Asking for increased vigilance in the wake of the London bombings, the government is warning that terrorists may pose as vagrants to conduct surveillance of buildings and mass transit stations to plot future attacks.

“In light of the recent bombings in London, it is crucial that police, fire and emergency medical personnel take notice of their surroundings, and be aware of ‘vagrants' who seem out of place or unfamiliar,” said the message, distributed via e-mail to some federal employees in Washington by the U.S. Attorney's office.

It is based on a State Department report that was issued last week. The State Department had no immediate comment Monday.

The warning is similar to one issued by the FBI before July 4, 2004, that said terrorists may attempt surveillance disguised as homeless people, shoe shiners, street vendors or street sweepers.

The Republican Administration in the US knows that in order to continue with it's fictional war on terrorism it must continue to make its citizens fearful and paranoid.

Hello American Citizens, wake up, it's not a bad dream. Yes you were attacked on your own soil, but the Bush administration was already preparing to go to war. The horryfiying reality is that you would still be in a war in Iraq regardless of 9/11. That was the Bush plan all along.

There is no war on terror, there is only the Bush war. Its an economic plan to keep America armed and dangerous, so as to maintain your hegemony in the world economy. Since Viet Nam, America has relied on its military expansion to use up its surplus value and to create new capital. You need foriegn wars not to keep America safe from terrorism, but from an economic collapse.
A Permanent Arms Economy by Michael Kidron

Which reminds me that my favorite SF author Samuel R. Delaney, wrote the Fall of The Towers between 1963 and 1965 as a trilogy. (The Fall of the Towers (Bantam Spectra 0-553-25648-3, Feb ’86 [Jan ’86], $4.95, 401pp, pb) [Fall of the Towers] Reissue (Ace 1970) omnibus edition of the sf trilogy Out of the Dead City (Ace 1963), The Towers of Toron (Ace 1964), and City of a Thousand Suns (Ace 1965).)

It was NOT about the WTC Towers, they hadn't been built yet.

Nope it was an allegory on Vietnam. It was about an interplanetary war that didn't exist except in minds of its victims and the computers who controled their virtual war reality. It was the society of Tornor's ruling class way of keeping its economy booming, by a continual war against an unknown enemy, and keeping the big lie secret from it's citizens.

The protagonists of the novels are young anarchist nihilist beat poets who graffiti the streets with the slogan; "There is No War!"

A message that would serve American's well now.


SAMUEL RAY DELANY, JR. (b. April 1, 1942, New York, N.Y., U.S.), African-American critic and science-fiction novelist whose highly imaginative works address racial and social issues, heroic quests, and the nature of language.

Delany attended the Bronx High School of Science, and in the early 1960s, City College of New York (now City University of New York). His first novel, The Jewels of Aptor, was was written when he was nineteen and published in 1962. His subsequent trilogy, The Fall of the Towers, was completed while he was still twenty-one.



Gee mom he looks like one of those homeless terrorists.
Aw shut up, George



Big Apple Redux:
An Interview with Marshall Berman
Tony Monchinski

T.M.: Besides the enormous human toll, here in New York City we no longer have our Twin Towers. In the November 2001 final edition of Lingua Franca you have an article entitled, "When Bad Buildings Happen to Good People." Like yourself, I'm a native New Yorker, albeit one with fewer years under his belt. For me, the Twin Towers always were: they were natural and normal, a part of the city as if they had always been. In Lingua Franca you describe the Towers as "expressions of an urbanism that disdained the city and its people." Please explain.

M.B.: If you contrast the World Trade Center with the skyscrapers in New York that were most prominent before them, the Chrysler and the Empire State Buildings, these building were on the streets, part of a total system, in the middle of life. The World Trade Center isolated itself from the city in very elaborate ways. It was hard to get to, it was hard to use. They had enormous expansives of space, but it was a lousy public space. In some ways they didn't want the rest of us there. Even before September 11th, it had its own forms of security clearance and it gave off hostility.

That's interesting, because just to the south of the World Trade Center, the Battery Park City Complex, which was built in roughly the same way through the Public Authority, was infinitely more user-friendly. Every weekend for most of the year, the parks, the Strand, the museums and restaurants that grew out of Battery Park City were jammed. People would use one or more of those, but to get to the subway to go home one would have to pass through the World Trade Center. And there it was like a ghost-town: you passed from this overflowing, full site to one that was empty.

From everything I heard, the Port Authority wanted it that way. Their idea of safety involved repelling the people. The slab shape of the Towers and their isolation grew out of an aesthetic voiced best by Le Corbusier, who said that in order to have modern planning we have to "kill the streets." For him the street epitomized disorder and chaos. The idea was to create some other system that repelled the city street. I think that this was one of the greatest mistakes made all over the world.

There is some fear of the city that plays an important role in 20th century culture. It created an endless series of completely sterile and empty gigantic spaces all over the world. There are certain types of stereotyped buildings that people eventually came to see as dreadful. But maybe they had to experience them and live with them before they could see what was wrong. That said, after the World Trade Center got bombed it made me and many other people feel more sympathy for it. Like us, it was vulnerable.

Monday, August 22, 2005

Go West Liberals,Thar's A Boom Out Thar

We Feel Your Pain Canada, Not

Alberta Awash in Riches

Alberta may get $7-billion surplus
Private sector foresees a booming budget as oil hovers above $65 (U.S.) a barrel. And as the money from crude and natural-gas royalties flood provincial coffers, there are concerns about how the Ralph Klein Conservatives will use the riches. "For the last 13 years, their whole mindset has been around the politics of constraint . . . well that doesn't prepare you well for the situation we are in now," said Roger Gibbins, president of the Canada West Foundation, a western think-tank. "It takes a real leap in imagination to get into this space. I think it's very difficult for this particular government to do this."

Well that's an understatement, the Ralph Reich is still in debt and deficit mode, and will be until the King steps down and makes way for his Calgary Corporate Replacement. But that does not assure us that the Party of Calgary will have any new ideas of what to do except like Scrooge McDuck to dive into their emabarssment of riches.



What's interesting is that the Harper Conservatives who complain about the Federal Liberal Government underestimating its surpluses are silent when Alberta does the same. Perhaps while Paul Martin is out here today, placating the alienated Alberta Robber Barons see below, he can ask Ralph for tips on underestimating surpluses and not having the opposition howl about it. Oh yeah that's right there is an Opposition in Ottawa, unlike Alberta.



The surplus we have in Alberta is thanks to the world price of crude and the $1 a litre gas prices at the pump in Toronto and Montreal. Thanks Canada. We appreciate your generosity even if we whine about our alienation. Again it's the Scrooge McDuck ideology in Alberta, 'they are out to get our oil, wealth, money." And its summed up as the NEP. Give it a break already heck most Albertans weren't even born when the NEP had its short lived existance.


Using data from First Energy Capital Corp. and Peters & Co. Ltd., The Globe and Mail estimated Alberta may reap an extra $3.9-billion to $4.1-billion in oil and gas royalties, on top of its budgeted $6.7-billion. Even the more conservative figure means that Alberta would take in a total of $11.6-billion in overall non-renewable resource revenue, easily surpassing the current record of $10.5-billion in fiscal 2000-01. In that scenario, the provincial surplus would swell to at least $6.9-billion, another record.

A growing windfall
Alberta's spring budget forecast $6.7 billion in oil and natural gas royalties but soaring prices since then mean the province will take in much more. Prices since April, along with analyst forecasts through to the end of March point to a windfall of close to $4billion, a record year for royalties and a surplus nearing $7 billion. The calculation of those extra royalties combine commodity price forecasts from First Energy Capital Corp. and Peters & Co. Ltd. with price sensibilities from Alberta Finance.
First Energy Capital Corp. Peters & Co.
First fiscal quarter $659 million $599 million
Second fiscal quarter $956 million $1.02 billion
Third fiscal quarter $1.23 billion $1.07 billion
Fourth fiscal quarter $1.27 billion $1.2 billion
Total $4.12 billion $3.89 billion

COMMODITY PRICE PROJECTIONS; FIRST ENERGY CAPITAL CORP AND PETERS CO.


Why that would be the amount needed to pay for Lyle Obergs $7 billion infrastructure bill, a need created because the Debt and Deficit Fear Mongers in the Kingdom of Ralph, failed to pay for them over the last decade. So there is no need to tap into the Heritage Trust Fund or to borrow the money.

But again the King Ralph and his government will cry poor, just like Scrooge McDuck, while being awash in riches, its been their mantra for 13 years why change now.




The Liberals Go West

Here they come
The boys in the bright white sports car
Waving their arms in the air
Who do they think they are?
And where did they get that car?

Boys In The Bright White Sports Car (Trooper)

A Great band from Calgary, home of Western Alienation and Warren Kinsella. This song started going in my head when I read about the PM and the Liberals moving right, err coming to Alberta to commiserate with those suffering from western alienation

PM's trip aimed at soothing West
On Monday, Martin will meet in Edmonton with the Canada West Foundation, an Alberta-based think tank that released a poll in 2003 that suggested most western Canadians believe the federal government doesn't care about them.

A right wing think tank from Southern Alberta, aren't they all, but not as right wing as the Western Standard.

Liberals seek to woo West at caucus meeting
At least one-third of western Canadians think it's time for their provinces to consider forming their own nation, a poll suggests. The survey, which was released earlier this month, was commissioned by Western Standard magazine, a right-leaning bimonthly news and opinion magazine founded in 2004 by Ezra Levant, a former Reform Party and Alliance Party activist."Westerners are very frustrated with their position in Confederation," said Faron Ellis, a political science professor at Lethbridge Community College, who conducted the survey.

Note Farron is also a longtime supporter of the Reform/ Alliance rump in the new Conservative party, he like this poll are NOT objective, and highly suspect. It's increbible that anyone gives this junk politics of Western Seperatism any credence, but then again Lougheed saw the danger of the right wing seperatist rump when the WCC won a provicial seat. Basically if you look at the politics of Western Seperatism they are the right wing of the right wing, old Social Credit, anti-French, anti-semitic, White Western Canada only type. Which means that they are all bluster and no base.

Of course Western Canada has suffered alienation from the East, cause it acted like a colonial power over the fate of the Western Provinces since the Riel Rebellion. But to kowtow to the likes of LeRant, the Byfields, Farron Ellis, or the majority of the Conservative Caucus, which comes from Alberta, is to capitulate to a minority view which is situated in one city; Calgary.

So lets call it Calgary Alienation, and Calgary Seperation, heck they already want to seperate from Alberta, cause we're all reds up here in Edmonton. And because they are the largest American city north of the 49th parellel. Whats good for Huston is good for Calgary.

And they rule the West in their little minds cause all the old eastern based capitalists are moving their Head Offices from Montreal, Toronto, and Winnipeg to Calgary. It gives them a royal swollen head about their importance as a city state.

Federal Budget gets big Canadian Yawn

One-half of respondents couldn't name one specific item from Goodale's financial blueprint. Half of Canadians paid absolutely no attention to the last federal budget, despite its long list of expensive spending promises on subjects ranging from child care to the military to seniors, federal government polling suggests.Cdns still demanding change: poll

To make matters worse, almost one-third still erroneously thought Ottawa is running deficits - undermining one of the Prime Minister Paul Martin's greatest claims to fame: the fact he balanced Ottawa's books, clearing the way for eight successive surplus budgets.

Okay Liberal media spinners here you go the messaage is; there is NO DEFICIT. The slogan should be hey we are like Alberta deficit free, and well on our way to being debt free thanks to the billions you bilked out of EI.

Liberals have been a little too successful with their controversial practice of underestimating surpluses to dampen public demands, said Derek Burleton, economist with TD Bank Group. "They've made clear . . . there are only limited fiscal resources and as a result, perhaps Canadians are interpreting that as government is running short of money - which spells deficit." Critics complain Goodale repeated that pattern in February's budget by projecting only a $3-billion surplus - just enough for his rainy-day fund - when the books are finally closed on fiscal 2004-05. In reality, the surplus should be about $6.8 billion, rising to $9.5 billion in 2005-06, thanks to lower debt-servicing costs and higher corporate tax payments, says economist Ellen Russell.

Yep who needs Monte Solberg whining about deficits when you have Goodale being cautious and the Liberals playing hide the surplus sasuage,with undeclared budget surpluses, to appear frugal and good managers. It fails to reassure Canadians all is well in the economy, surprize surpirze. Just say NO Deficit.

Surplus rockets to $9.5B
The federal government is -- and will continue -- racking up fatter-than-forecast budget surpluses that will climb back above the $10-billion mark next fiscal year, an economic think-tank says. The surplus this fiscal year will rise to $9.5-billion from an estimated $6.8-billion last year, and then surge even further to $11.3-billion in 2006-07, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives says in a new forecast prepared for the House of Commons finance committee.The surpluses forecast by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives are in excess of the $2-billion a year required to meet the conditions for that agreement with the NDP to be implemented.

Ok so perhaps its Alberta and Canada awash in riches, but I don't expect to see Paul Martin and Ralph Klein toasting each other like their predecesors, Peter Lougheed and Pierre Trudeau, did back when oil boomed in the eighties.

Nope don't see that at all.

Now thats Western Alienation, well actually it's Calgary Pig Headedness, cause out West here we are real friendly even to our enemies.

Sunday, August 21, 2005

US vs China for Global Hegemony



China differs from Japan in '80s: politics combines with potential for growth

The United States' trade deficit with China hit $162 billion last year, making it the largest imbalance ever recorded with a single country. This year's deficit is already running 32 per cent above last year's pace, and political pressure is heating up to put tighter restrictions on imports from China.That is why Chinese currency reforms take on much greater importance, that the Chinese might have learned from the Japanese to resist U.S.-led political pressure for currency revaluation. Japan ran into trouble in the late 1980s, in part by abdicating control over the yen and letting the dollar-yen conversion soar from 259 in 1985 to 121 by the end of 1987. Many blame that for setting the stage for an asset bubble that eventually collapsed in Japan.There are also significant political differences between the two. While the Chinese have been more open to foreign investment than Japan, there are some concerns that the communist political structure means that the Chinese won't embrace all kinds of foreign involvement such as an American company buying a big Chinese company. In addition, Standard & Poor's chief economist David Wyss points out that China's huge population - which he estimates is 10 times as large as Japan's - means that China has the capability of taking over world production of just about everything.

CHINA REPLACING THE UNITED STATES AS WORLD'S LEADING CONSUMER

China developed it's Three Worlds Geo Political Policy to combat American and Russian Hegemony back in the 1970's about the same time after Mao's death that the slow privatization of the State began.

Under the post Mao regime, the Three Worlds Policy acted as the basis of China's international relations. The Reforms of Deng Zhao Ping, and others kicked off the transition from a State Capitalist economy, to a mixed market economy. Anyone outside a few misquided Stalinists and Trotskyists who still believes that China is in anyway socialist and not an emerging capitalist economy is sadly deluded.

Chinese stocks surge as government's shareholder reforms advance


You can't have trusts, and stockholders in a socialist economy, these are the symptoms of industrial capitalism as outlined by Marx, Lenin, and Hilferding. China has moved beyond being a state capitalist economy, into being an industrialized monoploy capitalist economy. Which even the old left at Monthly Review has come to recognize.

China and Socialism: Market Reforms and Class Struggle
Martin Hart-Landsberg and Paul Burkett
Monthly Review July-August 2004, Volume 56 — Number 3


Unlike Social Democratic mixed economies in Europe, the Chinese model is not that much different from the MITTA in Japan. Today China is applying the Three Worlds Policy to its economic clout in the world economy in order to bolster its polticial and economic hegemony in the Asian Pacific and into the Middle East, The regions of the Stans, Afghanistan,Kazahstan, Krygistan, etc., and into Africa.

PetroKazakhstan sold for $4.18 billion
CALGARY -- Canadian-based oil company PetroKazakhstan Inc., which placed itself on the auction block, announced Monday it has entered into an agreement to be purchased by a subsidiary of China National Petroleum Corporation in a deal worth $4.18 billion US.

Japan could be defeated because it operates within the global economy. China's isolationism allowed it to do what Japan and Russia couldn't, develop its internal market operations to rely on external investment and distribution while having the backing of the surplus value produced under State Capitalism. China's privatization has the backing of the state, and it is rapidly creating not a free market but monopoly capitalism as a result of large scale fordist industrial production.

Center for International Private Enterprise
Economic Reform Today
Globalization, Trade and Democracy
Number 3, 1997
Reforming China's Trading System
by Will Martin


In other words the surplus value is now becoming exchange value in the global marketplace, while internal reforms have less of an impact on the state and politics, as they do on the new Chinese 'market' of monopoly capitalism. Capitalism does not need democracy to function. And China is proving that. WTO China Updates

China and the world economy
From T-shirts to T-bonds
Jul 28th 2005
From The Economist
Beijing, not Washington, increasingly takes the decisions that affect workers, companies, financial markets and economies everywhere

Hence the urgency of the Americans to secure their place in the Alberta Tar Sands and in the global battle with Chinese capital over oil companies.

US To Raid Oil Sands

Americas Oil Security: Alberta's Tar Sands

Chinese President set to visit Canada
Coincidentally while US VP and Halliburton Consultant Dick Cheney will be visitng Alberta's Tar Sands.

China appears to notch a win in oil race
PetroKaz deal could reinforce country's presence in region

Rudyard Kipling and other 19th century writers called it the Great Game: British-held India and Czarist Russia playing out their imperialist ambitions on the vast and largely uncharted black hole of Central Asia that lay between them. More than a century later, there's a new "Great Game" under way in Central Asia, and the prize is one of the planet's last oil frontiers. Russia to the North, India to the South, China to the East and the United States all want a piece of the oil-rich countries of the Caspian Sea basin, including the mainly Muslim former Soviet republics of Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. Yesterday, a unit of China National Petroleum Corp. struck a $4.18-billion (U.S.) deal to buy Calgary-based PetroKazakhstan Inc. and its roughly 150,000 barrels a day of oil production in Kazakhstan. The apparent loser in the bidding was India's Oil and Natural Gas Corp.

Venezuela's oil company sets sights on China
Venezuela's oil company opened an office in China, a client that is becoming increasingly important to the oil-rich South American country, the state news agency reported yesterday. Oil Minister Rafael Ramirez, who is visiting China, told the Bolivarian News Agency the new office in Beijing will serve as a "bastion for forging relations with new strategic partners." Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has promoted a closer relationship with China, India and other Asian countries in an effort to secure new markets for oil aside from the United States. Venezuela currently ships 68,000 barrels of oil per day to China, compared 12,300 barrels daily last year. AP

Unlike Japan, China views this as much as an economic war as one by any other name. Or in Clauswitzian terms; War is international economics by any other name, and the USA is no longer the lone hegemon in this field. China unlike the USA plans in terms of long wave strategies, as does Japan, which leaves the US vulnerable to eventual economic, military and political defeat in the Asian Pacific Region as well as in the currently contested region of the 'Stans. US imperialism is subject to the limitation of a national isolationist sensibility, while China has no such compunction.

''Setting the Stage for a New Cold War: China's Quest for Energy Security''
However, just as China has for centuries engaged in competition for leadership of Asia, the developing world and status on the world stage, so the need for energy security has now raised the possibility of further competition and confrontation in the energy sphere. This competition has so far been limited to the economic sphere through state-owned oil and gas companies such as China Petroleum & Chemical Corporation (Sinopec), China National Petroleum Corporation (C.N.P.C.), its subsidiary PetroChina and China National Offshore Oil Corporation (C.N.O.O.C.). However, as oil prices rise and China imports an increasing amount of its energy needs, the competition is likely to spill over into the political and military spheres. There are already indications of this.

China: middle kingdom, world centre
Le Monde Diplomatique August 2005
China has announced that the yuan will no longer be pegged to the dollar; greater currency flexibility will permit Beijing to use monetary policy to control its economy. And the entry of its enormous labour force into the global economy will change the world balance of trade. China wants to bypass the Japanese-United States alliance in Asia and at the United Nations, and, through asymmetrical diplomacy, become a different kind of world power.

China: Containment Won't Work By Henry A. Kissinger
Nevertheless, ambivalence has suddenly reemerged. Various officials, members of Congress and the media are attacking China's policies, from the exchange rate to military buildup, much of it in a tone implying China is on some sort of probation. To many, China's rise has become the most significant challenge to U.S. security.Military imperialism is not the Chinese style. Clausewitz, the leading Western strategic theoretician, addresses the preparation and conduct of a central battle. Sun Tzu, his Chinese counterpart, focuses on the psychological weakening of the adversary. China seeks its objectives by careful study, patience and the accumulation of nuances -- only rarely does China risk a winner-take-all showdown.It is unwise to substitute China for the Soviet Union in our thinking and to apply to it the policy of military containment of the Cold War. The Soviet Union was heir to an imperialist tradition, which, between Peter the Great and the end of World War II, projected Russia from the region around Moscow to the center of Europe. The Chinese state in its present dimensions has existed substantially for 2,000 years. The Russian empire was governed by force; the Chinese empire by cultural conformity with substantial force in the background. At the end of World War II, Russia found itself face to face with weak countries along all its borders and unwisely relied on a policy of occupation and intimidation beyond the long-term capacity of the Russian state

''China's Geostrategy: Playing a Waiting Game''
t is common knowledge that China is the most important ascending world power, and one that has only begun to realize its economic and military potential. Before the World Trade Center bombings on September 11, 2001, neoconservative strategists in Washington identified China as the most significant future threat to U.S. interests and defined the Sino-American relation as one of "strategic competition" rather than "strategic partnership." Although the "war on terrorism" has taken precedence over the longer term conflict with China in Washington's geostrategy, the neoconservatives' pre-9/11 judgment was well founded and remains so.

The "ruling party" -- as the Communists in Beijing now call themselves -- sees China's ultimate interest as becoming the undisputed regional power center in East and Southeast Asia, and a major influence -- along with India -- in South Asia, and -- along with Russia -- in Central Asia. In order to achieve its goals, Beijing will have to edge Washington out of Asia by incorporating Taiwan and rendering Washington's security guarantees for Japan and South Korea less credible. Beijing's strategy puts Washington on the defensive with the expectation that, as time goes on, the balance of power will shift inexorably in Beijing's favor. That is why Washington's current National Security Strategy posits a window of opportunity of about a decade for the U.S. to achieve permanent strategic supremacy in the world.

At present, China is what historian John Gittings calls a "status-quo power that often punches below its weight in international politics." That is a realistic position for a power to take that expects its situation to improve over time, as it builds up its economy and military to full potential. For the moment, Beijing's interests are best served by adopting a "defensive" posture and a foreign policy geared to promoting stability. That is likely to change to a more assertive stance the more that China's power resources increase.

Saturday, August 20, 2005

Support Locked Out CBC Workers


Adrienne Arsenault in
Neve Dekalim on the Gaza Strip on August 15, day 1 of the lockout.




CBC Workers Blog, Podcast, use student radio
Its an on air strike back by locked out CBC workers. They are blogging, podcasting, doing an online webnews page, and working with Canada's University/College radio stations which have public fm access, to create an alternative to CBC, broadcasting your favorite shows on air, as mp3's, etc. Its a whole new era of high tech labour activism.


Locked-out CBC staff in Calgary launches weekly radio broadcast Canadian Press
CALGARY - Locked-out CBC Calgary personalities launched a news and current affairs show on university radio Monday as the dispute with the public broadcaster dragged into its second week. "We hope we only have to do this once," said Tom Spear of the Canadian Media Guild, which represents 5,500 employees who have been locked out since Aug. 15. "But we're prepared to do it once a week for one hour on Mondays for as long as the lockout lasts."The program, on CJSW at the University of Calgary, began at 11 a.m. and was hosted by Newsworld anchor Kathleen Petty and other local broadcasters. Other radio shows are planned across the country in Vancouver and Fredericton through connections with campus radio stations.















Help Locked Out CBC Workers

Contact Anne McLellan and ask that she help resolve the dispute.

Alberta Federation of Labour Aug 19, 2005

4,500 CBC workers, ranging from technicians to on-air personalities, were locked out on August 15. The main issue in the dispute is CBC's attempt to bring in temporary contract workers, undermining job security and stability.

The Canadian Media Guild is asking Canadians to contact their MP to ask that the federal government step in to help resolve the dispute. In Alberta, we are being asked to contact Deputy Prime Minister Anne McLellan. You can contact her here:

Anne McLellan
MP Edmonton Centre
Constituency phone: (780)495-3122
Ottawa phone: (613)992-4524
email:
McLellan.A@parl.gc.ca

Find the contact information for your local MP here.

For more on the CBC Lockout, go to the Canadian Media Guild's website.

Also see my blog articles on the strike:

Nasty Mother Corp.


Solidarity With Locked Out CBC Workers

And the issue is not Wages, Labour disputes not about wages

Like the Telus Lock Out, this is Management attempting to outsource and privatize work. And it is a Lock Out by Management this is NOT a strike.

Outsourcing is the 21st Century class stuggle; like the eight hour day was the 20th Century labour struggle.

CBC, union see contract work as the great divide

Contracted labour: Better for corporate bottom lines, worse for society?

Trend toward contracts over full-time jobs bad for society, say experts






Thursday, August 18, 2005

Anarchism and Authority

ON AUTHORITY- by Frederick Engels

A number of Socialists have latterly launched a regular crusade against what they call the principle of authority. It suffices to tell them that this or that act is authoritarian for it to be condemned. This summary mode of procedure is being abused to such an extent that it has become necessary to look into the matter somewhat more closely.
 
Authority, in the sense in which the word is used here, means: the
imposition of the will of another upon ours; on the other hand, authority
presupposes subordination. Now, since these two words sound bad, and the
relationship which they represent is disagreeable to the subordinated
party, the question is to ascertain whether there is any way of dispensing
with it, whether -- given the conditions of present-day society -- we
could not create another social system, in which this authority would be
given no scope any longer, and would consequently have to disappear.

On examining the economic, industrial and agricultural conditions which
form the basis of present-day bourgeois society, we find that they tend
more and more to replace isolated action by combined action of
individuals. Modern industry, with its big factories and mills, where
hundreds of workers supervise complicated machines driven by steam, has
superseded the small workshops of the separate producers; the carriages
and wagons of the highways have become substituted by railway trains, just
as the small schooners and sailing feluccas have been by steam-boats.
Even agriculture falls increasingly under the dominion of the machine and
of steam, which slowly but relentlessly put in the place of the small
proprietors big capitalists, who with the aid of hired workers cultivate
vast stretches of land.

Everywhere combined action, the complication of processes dependent upon
each other, displaces independent action by individuals. But whoever
mentions combined action speaks of organisation; now, is it possible to
have organisation without authority?

Supposing a social revolution dethroned the capitalists, who now exercise
their authority over the production and circulation of wealth. Supposing,
to adopt entirely the point of view of the anti-authoritarians, that the
land and the instruments of labour had become the collective property of
the workers who use them. Will authority have disappeared, or will it
only have changed its form? Let us see.

Let us take by way if example a cotton spinning mill. The cotton must
pass through at least six successive operations before it is reduced to
the state of thread, and these operations take place for the most part in
different rooms. Furthermore, keeping the machines going requires an
engineer to look after the steam engine, mechanics to make the current
repairs, and many other labourers whose business it is to transfer the
products from one room to another, and so forth. All these workers, men,
women and children, are obliged to begin and finish their work at the
hours fixed by the authority of the steam, which cares nothing for
individual autonomy. The workers must, therefore, first come to an
understanding on the hours of work; and these hours, once they are fixed,
must be observed by all, without any exception. Thereafter particular
questions arise in each room and at every moment concerning the mode of
production, distribution of material, etc., which must be settled by
decision of a delegate placed at the head of each branch of labour or, if
possible, by a majority vote, the will of the single individual will
always have to subordinate itself, which means that questions are settled
in an authoritarian way. The automatic machinery of the big factory is
much more despotic than the small capitalists who employ workers ever have
been. At least with regard to the hours of work one may write upon the
portals of these factories: _Lasciate ogni autonomia, voi che entrate!_
[Leave, ye that enter in, all autonomy behind!]

If man, by dint of his knowledge and inventive genius, has subdued the
forces of nature, the latter avenge themselves upon him by subjecting him,
in so far as he employs them, to a veritable despotism independent of all
social organisation. Wanting to abolish authority in large-scale industry
is tantamount to wanting to abolish industry itself, to destroy the power
loom in order to return to the spinning wheel.

Let us take another example -- the railway. Here too the co-operation of
an infinite number of individuals is absolutely necessary, and this
co-operation must be practised during precisely fixed hours so that no
accidents may happen. Here, too, the first condition of the job is a
dominant will that settles all subordinate questions, whether this will is
represented by a single delegate or a committee charged with the execution
of the resolutions of the majority of persona interested. In either case
there is a very pronounced authority. Moreover, what would happen to the
first train dispatched if the authority of the railway employees over the
Hon. passengers were abolished?

But the necessity of authority, and of imperious authority at that, will
nowhere be found more evident than on board a ship on the high seas.
There, in time of danger, the lives of all depend on the instantaneous and
absolute obedience of all to the will of one.

When I submitted arguments like these to the most rabid
anti-authoritarians, the only answer they were able to give me was the
following: Yes, that's true, but there it is not the case of authority
which we confer on our delegates, but of a commission entrusted! These
gentlemen think that when they have changed the names of things they have
changed the things themselves. This is how these profound thinkers mock
at the whole world.

We have thus seen that, on the one hand, a certain authority, no matter
how delegated, and, on the other hand, a certain subordination, are things
which, independently of all social organisation, are imposed upon us
together with the material conditions under which we produce and make
products circulate.

We have seen, besides, that the material conditions of production and
circulation inevitably develop with large-scale industry and large-scale
agriculture, and increasingly tend to enlarge the scope of this authority.
Hence it is absurd to speak of the principle of authority as being
absolutely evil, and of the principle of autonomy as being absolutely
good. Authority and autonomy are relative things whose spheres vary with
the various phases of the development of society. If the autonomists
confined themselves to saying that the social organisation of the future
would restrict authority solely to the limits within which the conditions
of production render it inevitable, we could understand each other; but
they are blind to all facts that make the thing necessary and they
passionately fight the world.

Why do the anti-authoritarians not confine themselves to crying out
against political authority, the state? All Socialists are agreed that
the political state, and with it political authority, will disappear as a
result of the coming social revolution, that is, that public functions
will lose their political character and will be transformed into the
simple administrative functions of watching over the true interests of
society. But the anti-authoritarians demand that the political state be
abolished at one stroke, even before the social conditions that gave birth
to it have been destroyed. They demand that the first act of the social
revolution shall be the abolition of authority. Have these gentlemen ever
seen a revolution? A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing
there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its
will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon --
authoritarian means, if such there be at all; and if the victorious party
does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means
of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionists. Would the Paris
Commune have lasted a single day if it had not made use of this authority
of the armed people against the bourgeois? Should we not, on the
contrary, reproach it for not having used it freely enough?

Therefore, either one of two things: either the anti-authoritarians don't
know what they're talking about, in which case they are creating nothing
but confusion; or they do know, and in that case they are betraying the
movement of the proletariat. In either case they serve the reaction.

written 1872, published 1874 in the Italian Almanacco Repubblicano



Engels is right in his criticism of anti-authoritarian social democrats.

Just like then, the current 'anti-authoritarian' movement on the left,


still does the knee jerk reaction to so called authority.

And lets be clear this is a a movement of the generic liberal left

in North America not specifically anarchist or libertarian as much

as it's supporters claim it to be.

Hence the navel gazing crusade to adopt consensus building

as key to the anti capitalist movement, while approving sectarian

self aggrandizing actions like the black block as being acts of 'autonomy'.

As Engels says; "
It suffices to tell them that this or that act is authoritarian

for it to be condemned". Yep nothing has changed in 133 years


Anarchism however is NOT Anti-Authoritarian liberalism as Emma Goldman

continously pointed out much to the chagrin of other anarchists of the time.


Which is why I do-not call myself an anti-authoritarian anything.


And neither did he:


  • About the Platform, Nestor Makhno (a reply to Malatesta) 1928

You yourself, dear Malatesta, recognise the individual responsibility
of the anarchist revolutionary. And what is more, you have lent your
support to it throughout your life as a militant. At least that is how
I have understood your writings on anarchism. But you deny the
necessity and usefulness of collective responsibility as regards the
tendencies and actions of the anarchist movement as a whole. Collective
responsibility alarms you; so you reject it.

For myself, who has acquired the habit of fully facing up to the
realities of our movement, your denial of collective responsibility
strikes me not only as without basis but dangerous for the social
revolution, in which you would do well to take account of experience
when it comes to fighting a decisive battle against all our enemies at
once. Now my experience of the revolutionary battles of the past leads
me to believe that no matter what the order of revolutionary events may
be, one needs to give out serious directives, both ideological and
tactical. This means that only a collective spirit, sound and devoted
to anarchism, could express the requirements of the moment, through a
collectively responsible will. None of us has the right to dodge that
element of responsibility. On the contrary, if it has been until now
overlooked among the ranks of the anarchists, it needs now to become,
for us, communist anarchists, an article of our theoretical and
practical programme.

Only the collective spirit of its militants and their collective
responsibility will allow modern anarchism to eliminate from its
circles the idea, historically false, that anarchism cannot be a guide
- either ideologically or in practice - for the mass of workers in a
revolutionary period and therefore could not have overall
responsibility.

MAKHNO AND THE MAKHNOVSHCHINA.

Makhno led his army from the front but he also ran it with few concessions
to his political beliefs, discipline was harsh and often terminal.


The Makhnovist military forces
were commanded directly by Makhno and his staff with only lip service
paid to the ‘Regional Congress of Peasants, Workers and Insurgents’,
who theoretically controlled them. Makhno’s General staff were chosen
by him and were mainly Gulyai-Pole men that he new and trusted, this
group despite its lack of trained career officers was the backbone of
the Insurgent Army. So successful was Makhno’s tactics and organisation
that the White’s believed he had a professional staff pressganged from
captured officers, rumours spread that Makhno was advised by Colonel
Kleist a member of the German General Staff. In reality the Makhnovists
had no professional officers among their army, captured officers and
NCO,s were shot and the ordinary soldiers either joined the Makhnovists
or were disarmed and released after being distributed Makhnovist
propaganda. Though the Staff officers were appointed by Makhno, on a
Regimental level officers were elected by the men from their own ranks
and were mostly ex-soldiers. As to Makhnovist order of battle it is
confusing, certainly troops were organised into regiments, but it is
unknown if they were all of the same size or organisational structure.
Specialised units included eight Machine gun regiments of 300 men each,
and two Artillery divisions. Former Red army infantry Regiments
fighting with the Makhnovists would be of between 400 to 1,000 men.
Regiments seem to have been quite large and when fighting on the front
organised into Corps of six regiments. The confusion over the
Makhnovists order of battle probably has more to do with the
destruction of almost all of the records of the insurgent Army and the
deaths of most of its commanders than with any problems of
organisation. As well as the fighting forces the Makhnovists had their
own intelligence service the Kontrazvedka who gathered intelligence
from the villages and arrested Bolshevik and White spies, foiling
several attempts on Makhno’s life by the Bolshevik’s. The Makhnovists
while certainly not in the same league as the Red Army organisationally
did have an organised senior military staff, a civilian political
organisation and unit organisation at regimental level . Indeed for
several months they were part of the Red Army fighting on the southern
front against Denikin and later the Makhnovists activities in the
Whites rear forced Denikin to divert forces from the Moscow front to
deal with the insurgents. these were hardly the actions of counter
revolutionary kulaks.
The Makhnovists described themselves as Anarchists
but this has been denied by critics and indeed contemporary Anarchist
supporters of the Makhnovists. The 3rd Nabat (Confederation of
Anarchist Organisations of the Ukraine)Conference in Kharkiv held in
September 1920 reported that;
"As regards the ‘Revolutionary Partisan Army of the
Ukraine (Makhnovites)....it is a mistake to call it anarchist....mostly
they are Red soldiers who fell into captivity, and middle peasant
volunteers".
As regards the insurgent army this is basically true
many Red army men captured by the Makhnovists decided to stay and fight
and the majority of Makhno’s cavalry were middle peasants, due to the
agricultural development in South East Ukraine commercial grain farming
in an area of low population wages were higher and there was a far
larger number of middle peasants than in other areas of the Ukraine.
Makhno was undoubtedly an Anarchist of deep conviction he had spent
nine years in prison for his involvement with crimes committed while a
member of an Anarchist Communist group in Gulyai-Pole and had his
beliefs strengthened and sharpened by his time in prison with other
Anarchists. On leaving prison he worked in Gulyai-Pole to set up
organisations based on Anarchistic principles and attempted to apply
his beliefs to the Makhnovshchina. Makhno was no ideologue following
the teachings of any one Anarchist ideology he believed that Anarchism
was not a doctrine but a way of life;
"Anarchism does not depend on theory or on programmes
which try to grasp man’s life in its entirety.
It is a teaching which is based on real life,
which outgrows all artificial limitations".

To compare the Makhnovists and foreign peasant movements one should
look to Mexico and the Mexican Civil War which gives two peasant
movements to compare with Makhno’s.That of Doroteo Arango
(Pancho Villa) and Emiliano Zapata.

With the fall of the dictator Porfirio Diaz in 1910 Mexico fell into confusion
with peasant rebels, constitutional reformists and reactionary
supporters of the old regime vying for control over the country. Villa
operated in the Northern state of Chihuahua an area mainly of cattle
ranches and dominated by the landed upper classes. Labour was scarcer
and more expensive than in the rest of rural Mexico and the
independently minded cowboy’s and bandit’s provided Villa with
supporters susceptible to revolutionary propaganda. These hard core of
supporters provided Villa with cavalry, and like Makhno his was a war
of manoeuvre. Villa unlike Makhno could obtain weapons and equipment
from outside his own area across the border in the United States. Villa
like Makhno was a peasant who while in Prison gained what political
education he had from Gildardo Magana an intellectual involved in the
Zapatista movement. By 1914 he commanded 40,000 troops in the North of
Mexico. Although he paid lip service to the land reform program of
Zapata he never carried out any agrarian reforms, due partly to the
difficulties of dividing cattle estates up viably among peasants and
cowboys . In the South of Mexico, Emiliano Zapata led a peasant
partisan army that had perhaps more political similarities to the
Makhnovists than any other. Operating in their home region of Morelos
the Zapatistas redistributed the land of the huge estates (Haciendas)
to the local peasantry and sought to build self governing village
communities similar to those advocated by Makhno. Indeed the
Zapatista’s rural anarchism resembled that of the Makhnovists. Like the
Makhnovists the Zapatistas had to rely on what materials and supplies
they could capture and operated in their home region with some success
eventually capturing the capital Mexico city. The Zapatistas fought
mainly a defensive guerrilla campaign which was unable to defeat
superior government forces in open battle. Both the Zapata and Villa
movements failed to become more than peasant rebellions concentrated in
their home regions, and both failed to gain support among the urban
working class. The constitutional government who gained power with the
help of these two movements then turned on them killing Zapata in an
ambush in 1919 and making peace with Villa who was later assassinated
in 1923.


The Makhnovshchina was a peasant movement based
mainly on the support gained from around its centre, Gulyai-Pole and
the surrounding province of Ekaterinoslav. The Makhnovists
redistributed the land to the peasantry and attempted to run its
affairs in an instinctive Anarchistic fashion, despite the lack of
intellectuals among their ranks. While the Bolsheviks attacked them for
being petty-bourgeois Kulaks and agents of French and Belgian
financiers, they were quite happy to accept the Makhnovists help
against the White armies of Denikin and Wrangel. The Makhnovshchina was
a regional phenomenon which failed to gain support in urban areas, it
did succeed in winning the support of the Ukrainian peasant by
addressing their needs and organising in ways they could recognise and
relate to from their own experience of village life. But its strength
in the countryside, the movements understanding of peasant life was its
weakness when trying to organise in the urban environment.


Emma Goldman
My Disillusionment In Russia
CHAPTER XI

A VISIT FROM THE UKRAINA

In 1918, when the Brest Peace opened Ukraina to German and Austrian
occupation, Makhno organized the rebel peasant bands in defence against the
foreign armies. He fought against Skoropadski, the Ukrainian Hetman, who was
supported by German bayonets. He waged successful guerilla warfare against
Petlura, Kaledin, Grigoriev, and Denikin. A conscious Anarchist, he laboured to
give the instinctive rebellion of the peasantry definite aim and purpose. It was
the Makhno idea that the social revolution was to be defended against all
enemies, against every counter-revolutionary or reactionary attempt from right
and left. At the same time educational and cultural work was carried on among
the peasants to develop them along anarchist-communist lines with the aim of
establishing free peasant communes.


In February, 1919, Makhno entered into an agreement with the Red Army. He was
to continue to hold the southern front against Denikin and to receive from the
Bolsheviki the necessary arms and ammunition. Makhno was to remain in charge of
the povstantsi, now grown into an army, the latter to have autonomy in its local
organizations, the revolutionary soviets of the district, which covered several
provinces. It was agreed that the povstantsi should have the right to hold
conferences, freely discuss their affairs, and take action upon them. Three such
conferences were held in February, March, and April. But the Bolsheviki failed
to live up to the agreement. The supplies which had been promised Makhno, and
which he needed desperately, would arrive after long delays or failed to come
altogether. It was charged that this situation was due to the orders of Trotsky
who did not look favourably upon the independent rebel army. However it be,
Makhno was hampered at every step, while Denikin was gaining ground constantly.
Presently the Bolsheviki began to object to the free peasant Soviets, and in
May, 1919, the Commander-in-Chief of the southern armies, Kamenev, accompanied
by members of the Kharkov Government, arrived at the Makhno headquarters to
settle the disputed matters. In the end the Bolshevik military representatives
demanded that the povstantsi dissolve. The latter refused, charging the
Bolsheviki with a breach of their revolutionary agreement.


Meanwhile, the Denikin advance was becoming more threatening, and Makhno
still received no support from the Bolsheviki. The peasant army then decided to
call a special session of the Soviet for June 15th. Definite plans and methods
were to be decided upon to check the growing menace of Denikin. But on June 4th
Trotsky issued an order prohibiting the holding of the Conference and declaring
Makhno an outlaw. In a public meeting in Kharkov Trotsky announced that it were
better to permit the Whites to remain in the Ukraina than to suffer Makhno. The
presence of the Whites, he said, would influence the Ukrainian peasantry in
favour of the Soviet Government, whereas Makhno and his povstantsi would never
make peace with the Bolsheviki; they would attempt to possess themselves of some
territory and to practice their ideas, which would be a constant menace to the
Communist Government. It was practically a declaration of war against Makhno and
his army. Soon the latter found itself attacked on two sides at once--by the
Bolsheviki and Denikin. The povstantsi were poorly equipped and lacked the most
necessary supplies for warfare, yet the peasant army for a considerable time
succeeded in holding its own by the sheer military genius of its leader and the
reckless courage of his devoted rebels.


At the same time the Bolsheviki began a campaign of denunciation against
Makhno and his povstantsi. The Communist press accused him of having
treacherously opened the southern front to Denikin, and branded Makhno's army a
bandit gang and its leader a counterrevolutionist who must be destroyed at all
cost. But this "counter-revolutionist" fully realized the Denikin menace to the
Revolution. He gathered new forces and support among the peasants and in the
months of September and October, 1919, his campaign against Denikin gave the
latter its death blow on the Ukraina. Makhno captured Denikin's artillery base
at Mariopol, annihilated the rear of the enemy's army, and succeeded in
separating the main body from its base of supply. This brilliant manceuvre of
Makhno and the heroic fighting of the rebel army again brought about friendly
contact with the Bolsheviki. The ban was lifted from the povstar~tsi and the
Communist press now began to eulogize Makhno as a great military genius and
brave defender of the Revolution in the Ukraina. But the differences between
Makhno and the Bolsheviki were deeprooted: he strove to establish free peasant
communes in the Ukraina, while the Communists were bent on imposing the Moscow
rule. Ultimately a clash was inevitable, and it came early in January, 1920.


At that period a new enemywas threatening the Revolution. Grigoriev, formerly
of the Tsarist army, later friend of the Bolsheviki, now turned against them.
Having gained considerable support in the south because of his slogans of
freedom and free Soviets, Grigoriev proposed to Makhno that they join forces
against the Communist regime. Makhno called a meeting of the two armies and
there publicly accused Grigoriev of counter-revolution and produced evidence of
numerous pogroms organized by him against the Jews.

Declaring Grigoriev an enemy
of the people and of the Revolution,
Makhno and his staff condemned him and his
aides to death,
executing them on the spot. Part of Grigoriev's army joined
Makhno.

I Rest my case.




For Nick Driedger