Anti-Colonial Struggle in the Twenty-First Century

DOWNLOAD FULL EPISODE
Opening Theme

Hello brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, you’re listening to Back in the USSR on CFRU, I am Siegfried.  I realize my attendance record has been a little spotty over the course of that past month and I want to thank you for bearing with me on that.  But I am live in the studio now, and more or less fresh out of the demonstration in downtown Guelph that I participated in yesterday against the expansion of the Kinder-Morgan tarsands oil pipeline which is now being built on stolen indigenous territory in BC.  OPIRG was there, the GAP action group was there, the Guelph Young Communist League was there, Guelph and District Labor Council was there.  We marched from the Boathouse all the way to MP Lloyd Longfield’s office on Cork Street, we actually took the street on MacDonnell downtown and also made our presence felt outside the downtown branch of the TD Bank, a bank that has extensive investments in the BC pipeline projects and the Alberta tarsands.  We assembled outside the MP’s office, we delivered our message, an actual bottle of water from the BC watershed affected by the Kinder-Morgan pipeline, and several of us spoke, and spoke powerfully, not only against the pipeline itself and its corporate backers, but against the colonial state in Canada that makes it possible.  And those speakers were adamant, that this state needs to be broken down, the colonial system needs to be dismantled, it needs to be smashed, it needs to be overcome.  Because radical transformative change, revolution, is the only way that indigenous peoples and the land can receive justice.  There can be no justice under a system where profits are in command and where the endless expansion of profit is the bottom line in government and society.  This is especially true with regard to the environment and environmental justice, which was the focus of the demonstration, and it must be understood that the struggle to protect the water, the air, the soil, and so on, is inextricably linked and bound up in the struggle against capitalism and colonialism, both in this country and around the world.

 

Our demonstration in Guelph was only one of dozens which took place across the country on Friday, in solidarity with those activists and indigenous land defenders who put their bodies on the line to physically block and obstruct the construction of the Kinder-Morgan pipeline in BC.  130 of them were arrested this week, including elderly men and women, as the police moved in to protect the capitalists and their investments, as is their job in a capitalist society where profits are in command.  They are not there to protect the people, they are there to protect profit.  And that was reflected with how physical they got in arresting the demonstrators.  This is what one of the protestors, indigenous activist Clayton Thomas Mueller, had to say about what happened.

(Play “Aggressive Police Tactics Escalate Against Trans-Mountain Pipeline Protests”)

That was Clayton Thomas Mueller.  It has to be said that the Canadian government under Justin Trudeau has a truly amazing track record of saying one thing and doing something else entirely.  At the last round of global climate talks in Paris, he promised the world that Canada would take a leading role in cutting greenhouse gas emissions, and he followed up on that by dramatically escalating government support for the oil and gas sector, the tarsands and the pipelines, things that are not compatible with fighting climate change, let alone his vapid promises of “reconciliation” with indigenous peoples which have likewise been betrayed.  The Salish and other indigenous nations in BC and across the country have been struggling tooth and nail to defend what in many cases is completely unceded indigenous territory against the fossil fuel industry and the capitalist state that backs it.  This is not reconciliation, this is colonialism and colonial warfare against colonized people.  And just to show you how hand in glove the Canadian government is with the fossil fuel industry, I want to play this documentary from the Real News Network which is aptly titled “Is the Oil Industry Canada’s Deep State?” Please stay tuned to Back in the USSR.

(Play “Is the Oil Industry Canada’s Deep State?”)

You’re listening to Back in the USSR.  It’s well known by now that the capitalist drive for profit is indeed pushing the world toward climate catastrophe.  It’s well known that indigenous people and their allies, both in this country and around the world, are fighting back to defend their lands against the extractive industries threatening to devastate them.  It’s well known that this struggle is an anti-colonial struggle.  But because we just had the anniversary of the US Empire’s 2003 invasion of Iraq this past week in which a million people were killed, because we just had the anniversary of the 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia, because we just had the anniversary of the 2011 destruction of Libya, because of the US Empire’s military occupation of 25% of the land area of Syria, because of its renewed threats to destroy independent countries like Iran and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, because of the contamination of countries like Iraq, Libya, Syria and Serbia by the depleted uranium weapons used by the US Empire, I think it is safe to say that anti-colonialism and anti-colonial struggle remains the chief political task of our time if humanity is to have a future at all.  Many of the necessary connections have not yet been made in people’s minds.  But perhaps this poem, written by the then journalist William Pepper, who bore witness to the horrors being inflicted on the people of Vietnam in 1966-67, will make things clearer. 

“I come and stand at every door,

But no one hears my silent plea,

I stand and yet remain unseen,

For I am dead.  For I am dead.

I am only seven though I died in My Lai long ago,

I’m seven now as I was then,

When children die they do not grow.

My hair was scorched by swirling flame,

My eyes grew dim, my eyes grew blind,

Death came, and turned my bones to dust,

That was scattered by the wind.

All that I ask is but for peace,

You fight today, you fight today,

So that the children of this world may live and grow and laugh and play."

And the children of My Lai and their mothers and their grandparents were of course slaughtered by American soldiers in March 1968, yet another grim anniversary of colonial brutality that we mark this month. 

 When previous generations witnessed the devastation of Vietnam by Agent Orange in the Pentagon’s “Operation Hades”, the link between imperialism and environmental catastrophe was laid bare for all to see, but nowadays too many of the environmental activists who stand in solidarity with indigenous land defenders in BC do not stand with the Syrian people in their resistance against the American Empire that is both occupying and devastating their land, just as it did in Libya and Iraq.  When peoples and governments of the Third World resist imperialism today, Western activists are too often either silent or fall back on spurious legal arguments as opposed to expressing genuine solidarity.  For example, liberal anti-war activists continue to make a big deal about how the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was sold to the American people on the basis of false claims of the country possessing weapons of mass destruction, the implication being that if there were weapons of mass destruction it would have been OK to go in there and pulverize that country.  Liberals like to make the same argument about the Tonkin Gulf Incident and the Vietnam War, making one of the bloodiest colonial wars in history out to be a mistake rather than a crime of shocking proportions.  They’ve done the same with Iraq.  And, unfortunately, today there is no radical mass anti-war movement which makes anti-imperialism its core commitment, unlike in the days of the Vietnam War.  But what CIA defector John Stockwell outlines in the following discussion from 1988 is truer than ever.

(Play “The Crimes of the CIA”)

The following is a clip from Press TV’s correspondent Mohammed Ali in Damascus, Syria, discussing today’s liberation of the Harasta suburb of Eastern Ghouta from foreign-backed militants.  In contrast to Western media lies, the Syrian Army and the Syrian people have been taking their country back from Western trained and Western-funded terrorist groups, and, whenever civilians have been involved, they have opened humanitarian corridors to get them out of the combat zone.  The Syrian Army has rescued almost 100,000 people from terrorist held parts of Eastern Ghouta over the past week alone.  They are not massacring people, they are not using indiscriminate force.  Their goal is to defeat the Western-backed colonial project in their country and to protect the Syrian people and they are doing just that.  The battle in Eastern Ghouta is currently winding down and its full liberation is expected very soon.  This is something all opponents of colonialism should celebrate.  Please stay tuned to Back in the USSR.

(Play “Harasta fully emptied from terrorists”)

(Play Philip Agee “Inside the Company”)