Canada tramples on free speech

 

     By Reginald Johnson

        Commentary

   A stanza in the Canadian national anthem, ‘O, Canada’ goes like this:

‘From far and wide,

 ‘O, Canada! we stand on guard for thee!’

 ‘God keep our land glorious and free!’

‘O, Canada, we stand on guard for thee!’

  Unfortunately, based on events of the last few weeks, the word ‘free’ in that song may not apply anymore. And ‘glorious’ may not apply either.

 The Canadian government disgraced itself in brutally cracking down on a group of truckers, known as the ‘Freedom Convoy,’ who were protesting long-running vaccine mandates. The government acted more like a dictatorship run by Augusto Pinochet rather than a democracy that accommodates the expression of different points of view.

 Driving in from different parts of the country, the truckers had taken their rigs into Ottawa, the capital of Canada, blocked streets and blared their horns. Some other truckers for a time blocked the Ambassador Bridge, which links Windsor, Ontario, with Detroit, Michigan.

   No question, these protests were annoying and clearly interrupted daily life and regular business in Canada. But there was no significant violence during this period --- nobody burned down buildings, nobody robbed stores and nobody assaulted police.  As with any large protest group, some people behaved poorly and authorities made some arrests for alleged hate crimes, though few specifics have emerged.

  By and large, the demonstrators were peaceful and respectful. By blocking roads and bridges, the truckers were engaged in civil disobedience, a cherished tradition in democracies.

   But Prime Minister Justin Trudeau laced into the truckers, calling them hateful and violent. Instead of meeting with the group and trying to understand their grievances, Trudeau and local officials ordered the police to break up the protest, and break it up they did --- violently.

  Swinging batons, the police smashed the windows on trucks where truckers were refusing to leave. Another protester was thrown on the ground, and a video showed an officer kneeing the person repeatedly. Police rode horses into a crowd of people and a woman singing “Peace, Love and Freedom” was knocked to the ground and trampled.

   But the worst aspect of the government’s crackdown on the truckers was the move to essentially freeze their bank accounts. Trudeau, invoking Canada’s never-used “Emergencies Act,” had his government order a freeze on millions of dollars raised on social media accounts.

  This was an incredible attack on people’s rights of free speech and the right to protest. It has a fascistic ring to it --- a government attacking peoples’ finances simply because they don’t like their views or their acts of civil disobedience.

Parliament building, Ottawa, Canada. The government of Canada recently ordered a brutal crackdown on truckers protesting vaccine mandates, denying them free speech rights. 

 The Supreme Court of Canada approved the bank freeze in what Georgetown University Professor of Law Jonathan Turley called “a major blow to free speech and associational rights in Canada.”

  The Canadian Civil Liberties Association criticized Trudeau, saying the government’s use of emergency powers infringes on the basic rights of the truckers guaranteed to Canadians under the nation’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Amnesty International also criticized the Canadian government for its actions.

  It has been disturbing that members of the liberal-left and liberal media in the United States --- who years ago would have decried a government viciously cracking down on protesters --- seem to be supporting Trudeau’s martial-law tactics.

  CNN correspondent Paula Newton, for instance, said the truckers’ act of civil disobedience was nothing less than a “threat to democracy. An insurrection, sedition.”

  Turley said,  “Blocking streets, occupying buildings and shutting down bridges have long been tactics of protesters. Yet what constitutes a protest or an insurrection often seems to depend on the cause involved. When rioters caused billions of dollars of damages, burned police stations and occupied sections of American cities in the summer of 2020, for example, few in the media declared them to be terrorists or a threat to democracy.”

  The fundraising site, GofundMe, which previously helped in the funding of the Black Lives Matter protesters, froze more than $10 million raised for Canadian truckers to prevent it from being used to support them, Turley said.

  The attorney added, “The freezing of funds supporting the truckers laid bare the anti-free-speech trend sweeping the world, including in the US. There is no principled basis for cutting off the ability of citizens to support other citizens in a campaign of civil disobedience.”

  You get the feeling that most liberals and people on the left dismiss the truckers as a bunch of uneducated, white working-class racists who are probably admirers of Donald Trump. So in their view, these people are not worthy of being granted traditional rights of free speech and if they get slapped around by the police, then so be it.

  This, of course, is totally wrong. People have the right to free speech and the right to protest even if a majority of other people in the society don’t like what they’re saying. The right of free speech and the right of association cannot be selective.

  There is a concern that what happened in Canada to the Freedom Convoy could be a preview of coming attractions in the United States.

  The people in the United States have to be ever vigilant in protecting our core rights set forth in the Bill of Rights and the Constitution. We cannot allow what happened in Canada to happen here.

  

 

 

Protesters: No war with Russia!

 

   By Reginald Johnson

   Opposition is growing to a potential war with Russia over Ukraine.

 In the last two weeks, there’s been a flurry of protests around the country with people demanding that the United States and NATO stop their aggressive military actions in Eastern Europe, stop sending military aid to Ukraine and seek a diplomatic solution to the Ukraine crisis through the United Nations.

  Demonstrations began happening last week after a call was put out by a coalition of 12 antiwar organizations to mobilize against a war with Russia. The call was subsequently endorsed by another 200 peace groups.   

  Protests took place in 70 cities around the country on Saturday, followed by a national online rally, where peace activists spoke of the urgency of stopping the slide towards war. A webinar hosted by the United National AntiWar Coalition, with both national and international peace activists, took place on Sunday.

  More actions are taking place this week, such as one in Hartford, CT, where peace activists demonstrated outside the offices of US Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Connecticut, who is supporting the Biden administration’s Ukraine policy.

  “This is a really important time because of the escalation of aggression by the US government towards Russia and the amount of misinformation in the corporate media,” said Margaret Flowers director of Popular Resistance, one of the groups which organized the online rally.

  “We’re being lied into another war. The whole, you know, ‘Russia has troops on its border’ is equivalent to the ‘Saddam has WMDs’ that lied us into a disastrous war with Iraq,” she said.

  Flowers added that nearly 1,000 people signed a petition to President Biden and to UN Secretary-General Anthony Guiterrez, calling on them to resolve the Ukraine conflict in compliance with international law using the United Nations Security Council, “rather than what the United States is doing, using NATO to perform its war, which is how the US engages in all these illegal wars, bypassing international law.”

 

A protest against a possible war with Russia outside the offices of U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn, in Hartford. Blumenthal has been supporting hawkish US policies in Ukraine. (Photo by Henry Lowendorf)

      

     The protests are taking place as the U.S., NATO and Russia are engaging in a tense military stand-off in eastern Ukraine. The US and its allies are charging that Russia is “massing troops on the Ukraine border” in preparation for a possible invasion of Ukraine. Russia has been supporting pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine ever since a US backed coup installed a pro-western and far-right regime in Kiev in 2014.

   Biden administration officials, backed by both Republicans and Democrats in Congress, say that Ukraine’s “sovereignty” must be protected and that “Russian aggression” must be stopped.

 The US has been sending a steady stream of lethal aid to the Ukrainian regime over the past 8 years --- some $2.5 billion in arms and ammunition.

  US military advisors are on the ground in eastern Ukraine as are American mercenaries.  

Biden has threatened “severe consequences” for Russia --- including harsh economic sanctions --- if an invasion takes place.

 Russian officials maintain that they have no plans to invade, but say they are concerned about provocative US, NATO and Ukrainian military activity near their border and the US sending naval ships into the Black Sea, where Russia has a large naval port.

  The Russians are also concerned about the possibility of Ukraine joining NATO, the western military alliance formed more than 70 years ago to deter aggression by the Soviet Union, a country that no longer exists. Most European countries, including former Soviet bloc nations, are now in NATO. The alliance has bases throughout the continent, including missile launchers in Poland and Romania.

 President Vladimir Putin has made clear that any plan for ending the crisis in Ukraine must include a guarantee that Ukraine not be allowed to join NATO.

 But the US has already rejected a Russian peace plan which includes that guarantee.

Joe Lombardo, co-coordinator of the United National AntiWar Coalition (UNAC), said at the webinar that Americans are getting a false picture from their leaders and the media about who is responsible for the crisis in eastern Europe.

 “Now there are 300,000 US troops throughout Europe. There are 150,000 Ukrainian troops with US advisors and modern US weapons, including predator drones which have been used in some of the areas in Donbass (eastern Ukraine).  So there are 150,000 troops with US advisors in and around Donbass, that is on the Russian border, but that is not said in the media,” he said.

   Lombardo added that NATO is conducting “what they call wargames, right on the border with Russia. But when Russia puts its troops on the other side of the border, on its side of these wargames, the US says that’s aggressive, not the wargames.”

  He continued, “So it’s a very dangerous situation and the actual aggression is on the side of the United States, which in the last couple of decades has been in one war after another, one invasion and one occupation after another, many of them based on false flag situations.”

  Another speaker at the UNAC webinar was Vladimir Kozin, correspondent member of the Russian Academy of Military Science.

  Kozin talked of the repeated violations of the Minsk II peace accords and arms control treaties by both the United States and Ukraine. Kozin said that all 13 provisions of the Minsk Accords have been violated, including the prohibition on sending foreign fighters into the conflict zone.

   Kozin said that Russia had no plans to attack Ukraine now, but if Ukrainian forces should launch a full attack on Donbass, “surely Russia will come to support the population of Donbass.”

   At the protest in Hartford on Tuesday, 18 people stood outside the offices of Senator Blumenthal, who has strongly supported America's militaristic Ukraine policy.

  “We were protesting Senator Blumenthal’s promoting war and war hysteria,  and defending the illegal and violent coup the US engineered in 2014 to kick out the constitutional government of Ukraine, said Henry Lowendorf, of the Greater New Haven Peace Council.

  The group attempted to deliver a letter to Blumenthal’s office demanding that “all belligerent threats” towards Russia stop, that there be a resumption of honest diplomacy to settle any differences between the US and Russia, and that NATO not be allowed to expand eastward. But a security guard would not grant the group access to the office.  Lowendorf said he then left messages with both the Hartford and Washington offices.

   Lowendorf said a Washington staff member called back on Wednesday and left a message, but did not include a return number.

  “I couldn’t call the individual back … Senator Blumenthal runs a very unwelcoming office. He places roadblocks before the public even to meeting his staff. The way he runs his office contradicts the image he tries to project as a people friendly official,” Lowendorf said.

  Nonetheless, Lowendorf and the other activists, members of the Connecticut Peace and Solidarity Coalition, passed out fliers urging people to call their legislators in Washington at 202-224-3132 and the White House at 202-456-1111, demanding no war with Russia.

  At the UNAC webinar, Bruce Gagnon, coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in space said that there is a unique danger that could unfold from a war in Ukraine. He said there are 15 nuclear power plants in the country.

 “Imagine what could happen, from an accident or otherwise, with those nuclear power plants. That’s frightening,” Gagnon said, pointing out that radiation contamination would spread globally.

  “It’s absolutely insane what the US and NATO are doing today,” he said.

Ajamu Baraka, national organizer for the Black Alliance for Peace, stressed that people have to understand the central role that imperialism plays in the wars that keep erupting around the globe.

  “For the Black Alliance for Peace, let me be clear, we say the common enemy is the US-EU-NATO axis of domination. We argue that we must center our analysis within the context of the global class struggle,” he said.

 “It is imperialism, led by the United States, that is the culprit.”