This Issue: Taking a Stand

Psychologists call it cognitive dissonance. George Orwell called it double-think. Some of us might call it organized hypocrisy.

Call it what you will, it surrounds us. The government proclaims its commitment to ‘reconciliation’ with indigenous people, and says that its relationship with them is its most important relationship. At the same time the RCMP, following an order by a colonial court, invades unceded indigenous land and arrests people for occupying their own land. Governments mouth platitudes about the importance they place on dealing with the climate emergency while at the same time they build new pipelines and approve massive new tarsands projects. The biggest polluter on the planet – the U.S. military – meanwhile receives constant increases in its budget, even while it pursues demented schemes to take us to the edge of war, mostly recently by deploying a new generation of “low-yield” thermonuclear weapons on submarines. The theory, presumably, is that if the U.S. drops a few “low-yield” nuclear bombs on Russia or China, the Russian and Chinese won’t mind too much, and won’t retaliate.

All this is business as usual. Fortunately many people across the country, and around the world, are saying no to business as usual. They are taking a stand and disrupting business as usual.

In this issue of Other Voices, we spotlight the actions of people who are taking a stand and, in many different ways, are insisting on change.

– Ulli Diemer

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Topic of the week

Indigenous Struggles

The blockades, occupations, and protests that have erupted across Canada this month are part of an ongoing resistance that has gone on for decades. The Indigenous Struggles page in the Connexions Subject Index leads you to articles, books, and films related to current struggles, and to the history that they form a part of.
Find it here

This Week on Connexions.org

Outpouring of International Solidarity as RCMP Arrest Land Defenders

The arrests of Wet’suwet’en land defenders have sparked protests across Canada, and internationally. Rail lines continue to be blocked and people have poured into the streets, banks, and government offices to show their support for indigenous struggles.
Read more

Keywords: Indigenous Struggles – Police Raids

Wall Street Invading Wet’suwet’en Territory

While protesters have rightly condemned the RCMP actions against the Wet’suwet’en, they (and the corporate media) have largely overlooked the role of a major player in this whole debacle: Wall Street titan Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co., better known as KKR. As Joyce Nelson explains, KKR not only has a primary position in the midstream natural gas industry of Western Canada, it has also partnered with a company well-versed in stopping indigenous protests. KKR Global Institute’s Chair is David Petraeus, the former Director of the CIA, exemplifying the close connections between the oil industry, finance capital, the military, and the state security apparatus.
Read more

Keywords: Oil & Gas Industry – Oil & Gas/Environmental Issues

Bt Cotton: Cultivating Farmer Distress in India

In India’s increasingly commercialised countryside, independent cultivators have become dependent on corporate products, including off-farm commodified corporate knowledge. In the past, they cultivated, saved and exchanged seeds; now, as far as cotton cultivation is concerned, they must purchase GM hybrid seeds (and necessary chemical inputs) each year. In the brave new world of neoliberalism that India began to embrace in the early 1990s, says Colin Todhunter, responses to the ‘invisible’ hand of the market, the performance of questionable on-farm practices and financial distress have therefore been internalised and have become associated with a notion of personal responsibility, which can result in self-blame, shame and even suicide.
Read more

Keywords: Cotton – Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs)

Another step on the road to nuclear war: US Puts ‘Low-Yield’ Nukes on Submarines, spins it as a ‘de-escalation’ strategy

The United States has announced that it has deployed so-called “low-yield” nuclear weapons on its submarines. It is spinning this escalation of military confrontation as a way of reducing the risk of nuclear war. As former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter explains, there is no such thing as a ‘limited’ nuclear attack. Any use of weapons of mass destruction, on no matter how “small” a scale, would almost inevitably escalate into a planet-destroying nuclear holocaust.
Read more

Keywords: Nuclear Weapons – Weapons of Mass Destruction

The Military's Carbon Bootprint

There is no question that, across the planet, the biggest user of fossil fuels is the military. All those fighter jets, tanks, naval vessels, air transport vehicles, Jeeps, helicopters, humvees, and drones burn massive amounts of diesel, and gas daily, creating vast carbon emissions. And that’s not counting the huge portion of the ‘civilian’ economy that is devoted military production. So you’d think that discussions about the climate emergency would focus on the military’s carbon bootprint, or at least place it at the top of concerns. But, writes Joyce Nelson, you would be wrong. The military is simply ignored in mainstream discussion of climate change.
Read more

Keywords: Militarism – Military/Environmental Impact

Seeds of Fire

February 21, 1848
The Communist Manifesto
An obscure German-language printshop in London prints 1,000 copies of a 23-page political statement issued by a small revolutionary organization called the Communist League. With the whiff of revolution in the air, the manuscript has been hurriedly written by two young members of the League, 29-year-old Karl Marx and 27-year-old Friedrich Engels. In that spring of 1848, revolts start to break out across Europe. The original press run rapidly sells out, and the pamphlet, known as the Communist Manifesto, is quickly reprinted and translated into other languages. It goes on to become one of history’s most influential and widely-read political statements.

February 22 – 25, 1986
People Power revolution in the Philippines
A series of massive popular demonstrations against the Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines, originally starting in 1983, and reaching a peak in early 1986, with millions of people in the streets. On February 25, with support for his regime crumbling, Marcos decides to flee the country.

February 25, 1941
Anti-Nazi resistance in the Netherlands
Dutch Communists call a general strike in response to the first Nazi raid on Amsterdam’s Jewish population. Though the strike is put down within a few days, it marks the first large-scale resistance to Nazi occupation in the Netherlands, a resistance that later goes on to encompass underground armed resistance.

February 26, 1851
Anti-Slavery Society of Canada
The Anti-Slavery Society of Canada is founded “to aid in the extinction of slavery all over the world.”

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This issue was edited by Ulli Diemer.

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