Mandela and anti-colonial struggles

Millions around the world are mourning the loss of the symbol of the anti-apartheid struggle, Nelson Mandela. But people are mourning for different reasons. Most are mourning a freedom fighter who spent 27 years in jail for his opposition to colonialism and racism. Most are mourning a symbol of international solidarity, who spoke out against the Iraq War, supported people with HIV/AIDS and likened the Palestinian freedom struggle to his own. But others are using his death to hide the history of anti-colonial struggles and the contradictions of his later life.

Apartheid: a Canadian tradition

According to The National Post, Conservative Prime Minister Mulroney “spearheaded Canadian push to end apartheid in South Africa and free Nelson Mandela.” Mulroney welcomed Mandela into the House of Commons on June 18, 1990, later claiming that “the very notion of South Africa’s apartheid was anathema to me…I viewed apartheid with the same degree of disgust that I attached to the Nazis…I was resolved from the moment I became prime minister that any government I headed would speak and act in the finest traditions of Canada.”

But South African apartheid was based on Canadian tradition. According to Shannon Thunderbird, a Coast Tsimshian First Nations elder, “It is ironic because the Canadian Indian Act formed much of the basis for the oppressive apartheid policies in South Africa. It’s kind of an understood custom and practice that Canada’s Indian Act came to be known as the acceptable role model for apartheid policies and there are books and websites that outline all of this. It’s actually hypocrisy for Canada to stand forward as a kind of bulwark of protest against atrocities going on in other countries while at the same time we turn a blind eye to our own people.” Mulroney welcomed Mandela while the genocidal residential school system was still operational, and two months before sending thousands of Canadian soldiers to confront the Mohawk blockade at Oka.

It is not only the Conservatives whose tributes to Mandela reveal their hypocrisy. Liberal leader Justin Trudeau and former Prime Minister Jean Chretien called Mandela’s life inspiring, but Mandela certainly did not inspire the White Paper. In 1969—five years into Mandela’s incarceration, when Canada still supported South African apartheid—Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and his Minister for Indian Affairs Jean Chretien proposed the White Paper to forcibly assimilate First Nations. As the Cree activist Harold Cardinal wrote in his book The Unjust Society (exposing Trudeau’s claims of Canada’s supposed “Just Society”), “In spite of all government attempts to convince Indians to accept the white paper, their efforts will fail, because Indians understand that the path outlined by the Department of Indian Affairs through its mouthpiece, the Honourable Mr. Chrétien, leads directly to cultural genocide. We will not walk this path.”

Anti-colonial struggles

The Red Power movement emerged to challenge Canadian colonialism and defeat the White Paper, and later solidarity with Mandela and the anti-apartheid struggle swept the country. Mandela was part of a mass movement against apartheid that included student and township uprisings, armed resistance, mass strikes, and international solidarity. South African apartheid depended on black workers for profits, so the wave of unionization—including the founding of COSATU in 1985—provided a powerful weapon to organize strikes of millions against apartheid. It was South Africans themselves who spearheaded the push to end apartheid and free Nelson Mandela, not the “humanitarian intervention”  myths about Mulroney.

But there was widespread solidarity against South African apartheid, which has inspired a similar movement against Israeli apartheid. Which is why Western elites are so eager to detach Mandela from the struggle, counter-posing the South African freedom struggle with other anti-colonial struggles. Prime Minister Harper claims that Mandela “demonstrated that the only path forward for the nation was to reject the appeal of bitterness.” But it was the bitterness of fellow Conservative Rob Anders—who in 2001 called Mandela a terrorist—that best expressed how Western elites view anti-colonial struggles. That this label was imposed on the South African freedom fighters should lead us to challenge the criminalization of other anti-colonial struggles—from Palestine to Tamil Eelam to Turtle Island.

South Africa after apartheid

Mandela’s rehabilitation in the eyes of the elites, from terrorist to inspiration, is not because of newfound solidarity with his anti-apartheid past but rather the neoliberal policies of the ANC government. Reacting to news of Mandela’s passing, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund offered their sympathies to the South African people—sympathies that were lacking when these financial institutions imposed structural adjustment policies.

According to South Africa’s Anti-Privatization Forum and Coalition Against Water Privatization, “The majority of South Africans, made up of the poor and working class, fought and died not just for political freedom from apartheid, but for socio-economic freedom and justice, for the redistribution of all ‘national wealth’…This popular mandate was captured in the Reconstruction & Development Programme (RDP), which formed the basis of the ‘people’s contract’ with the new democratic government. However, it did not take long for the ANC government to abandon that popular mandate by unilaterally deciding to pursue a water policy that has produced the exact opposite result… Following the neo-liberal economic advice of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and various Western governments (and heavy lobbying by private multinational water companies, such as Suez and Biwater), the South African government drastically decreased grants and subsidies to local municipalities and city councils and supported the development of financial instruments for privatised delivery. This effectively forced local government to turn towards commercialisation and privatisation of basic services as a means of generating the revenue no longer provided by the national state. Many local government structures began to privatise and/or corporatise public water utilities by entering into service and management ‘partnerships’ with multinational water corporations. The immediate result was a massive increase in the price of water that necessarily hit poor communities the hardest.”

But the struggle for socio-economic freedom and justice, against the ANC government and global, corporations—from the Treatment Action Campaign for people with HIV/AIDS, to the protests outside the UN climate talks at Durban, to the strikes at Marikana and beyond. As Mandela himself said in 1993, “You must support the African National Congress only so far as it delivers the goods, if the ANC government does not deliver the goods, you must do to it what you have done to the apartheid regime.” The best tribute to Mandela is to continue the movement he represented—of anti-colonial resistance, student protests, workers strikes, and international solidarity.

Mandela and anti-colonial struggles

Millions around the world are mourning the loss of the symbol of the anti-apartheid struggle, Nelson Mandela. But people are mourning for different reasons. Most are mourning a freedom fighter who spent 27 years in jail for his opposition to colonialism and racism. Most are mourning a symbol of international solidarity, who spoke out against the Iraq War, supported people with HIV/AIDS and likened the Palestinian freedom struggle to his own. But others are using his death to hide the history of anti-colonial struggles.

Apartheid: a Canadian tradition

According to The National Post, Conservative Prime Minister Mulroney “spearheaded Canadian push to end apartheid in South Africa and free Nelson Mandela.” Mulroney welcomed Mandela into the House of Commons on June 18, 1990, later claiming that “the very notion of South Africa’s apartheid was anathema to me…I viewed apartheid with the same degree of disgust that I attached to the Nazis…I was resolved from the moment I became prime minister that any government I headed would speak and act in the finest traditions of Canada.”

But South African apartheid was based on Canadian tradition. According to Shannon Thunderbird, a Coast Tsimshian First Nations elder, “It is ironic because the Canadian Indian Act formed much of the basis for the oppressive apartheid policies in South Africa. It’s kind of an understood custom and practice that Canada’s Indian Act came to be known as the acceptable role model for apartheid policies and there are books and websites that outline all of this. It’s actually hypocrisy for Canada to stand forward as a kind of bulwark of protest against atrocities going on in other countries while at the same time we turn a blind eye to our own people.” Mulroney welcomed Mandela while the genocidal residential school system was still operational, and two months before sending thousands of Canadian soldiers to confront the Mohawk blockade at Oka.

It is not only the Conservatives whose tributes to Mandela reveal their hypocrisy. Liberal leader Justin Trudeau and former Prime Minister Jean Chretien called Mandela’s life inspiring, but Mandela certainly did not inspire the White Paper. In 1969—five years into Mandela’s incarceration, when Canada still supported South African apartheid—Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and his Minister for Indian Affairs Jean Chretien proposed the White Paper to forcibly assimilate First Nations. As the Cree activist Harold Cardinal wrote in his book The Unjust Society (exposing Trudeau’s claims of Canada’s supposed “Just Society”), “In spite of all government attempts to convince Indians to accept the white paper, their efforts will fail, because Indians understand that the path outlined by the Department of Indian Affairs through its mouthpiece, the Honourable Mr. Chrétien, leads directly to cultural genocide. We will not walk this path.”

Anti-colonial struggles

The Red Power movement emerged to challenge Canadian colonialism and defeat the White Paper, and later solidarity with Mandela and the anti-apartheid struggle swept the country. Mandela was part of a mass movement against apartheid that included student and township uprisings, armed resistance, mass strikes, and international solidarity. South African apartheid depended on black workers for profits, so the wave of unionization—including the founding of COSATU in 1985—provided a powerful weapon to organize strikes of millions against apartheid. It was South Africans themselves who spearheaded the push to end apartheid and free Nelson Mandela, not the “humanitarian intervention” myths about Mulroney.

But there was widespread solidarity against South African apartheid, which has inspired a similar movement against Israeli apartheid. Western elites are eager to detach Mandela from the struggle, counter-posing the South African freedom struggle with other anti-colonial struggles. Prime Minister Harper claims that Mandela “demonstrated that the only path forward for the nation was to reject the appeal of bitterness.” But it was the bitterness of fellow Conservative Rob Anders—who in 2001 called Mandela a terrorist—that best expressed how Western elites view anti-colonial struggles. That this label was imposed on South African freedom fighters should lead us to challenge the criminalization of other anti-colonial struggles—from Palestine to Tamil Eelam to Turtle Island.

South Africa after apartheid

Mandela’s rehabilitation in the eyes of the elites, from terrorist to inspiration, is not because of newfound solidarity with his anti-apartheid past but rather the neoliberal policies of the ANC government. Reacting to news of Mandela’s passing, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund offered their sympathies to the South African people—sympathies that were lacking when these financial institutions imposed structural adjustment policies in the 1990s.

According to South Africa’s Anti-Privatization Forum and Coalition Against Water Privatization, “The majority of South Africans, made up of the poor and working class, fought and died not just for political freedom from apartheid, but for socio-economic freedom and justice, for the redistribution of all ‘national wealth’…This popular mandate was captured in the Reconstruction & Development Programme (RDP), which formed the basis of the ‘people’s contract’ with the new democratic government. However, it did not take long for the ANC government to abandon that popular mandate by unilaterally deciding to pursue a water policy that has produced the exact opposite result… Following the neo-liberal economic advice of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and various Western governments (and heavy lobbying by private multinational water companies, such as Suez and Biwater), the South African government drastically decreased grants and subsidies to local municipalities and city councils and supported the development of financial instruments for privatised delivery. This effectively forced local government to turn towards commercialisation and privatisation of basic services as a means of generating the revenue no longer provided by the national state. Many local government structures began to privatise and/or corporatise public water utilities by entering into service and management ‘partnerships’ with multinational water corporations. The immediate result was a massive increase in the price of water that necessarily hit poor communities the hardest.”

But the struggle for socio-economic freedom and justice, against the ANC government and global corporations, continues—from the Treatment Action Campaign for people with HIV/AIDS, to the protests outside the UN climate talks at Durban, to the strikes at Marikana and beyond. As Mandela himself said in 1993, “You must support the African National Congress only so far as it delivers the goods, if the ANC government does not deliver the goods, you must do to it what you have done to the apartheid regime.” The best tribute to Mandela is to continue the movement he represented—of anti-colonial resistance, protests and strikes, and international solidarity.

"Female viagra" and the medicalization of women

The pharmaceutical giant Boehringer Ingelheim has dropped its plan to market its failed antidepressant as a “female viagra” pill. The US Food and Drug Administration slammed the drug studies for failing to produce benefits, while 15% of women dropped out of the study due to side effects like depression, fainting and fatigue. “Female sexual dysfunction” is the latest pharmaceutical attempt to pathologize women, while real healthcare needs go unmet.




"FEMALE VIAGRA"
     According to a recent Globe&Mail article:

“Female sexual dysfunction” – a much-debated term that includes lack of desire and inability to reach orgasm – was entrenched when a 1999 article in the Journal of the American Medical Association announced that 43 per cent of women suffer from some form of sexual dysfunction. Problematically, the lead author was revealed to have financial ties to Pfizer.” 

Marketing this drug as a “female Viagra” is also problematic: Viagra is to achieve a physical erection, while these pills for women are trying to alter their brain chemistry to promote desire they are told is insufficient.  This does not mean taking a nihilistic attitude towards medicine but to acknowledge the impact of profit-driven pharmaceutical companies (for more on this check out the documentary Orgasm Inc.). As Ray Moynihan, co-author of Sex, Lies and Pharmaceuticals: How Drug Companies Plan to Profit from Female Sexual Dysfunction explained in the article above:

“There would be a cohort of women with nerve damage after surgery, or sexual side effects of SSRIs, for which a health professional could be extremely helpful. But to categorize the changes in desire that happen as we move through our lives and relationships as symptoms of a disorder or a dysfunction is highly controversial and questionable. I’m not sure that women going through absolutely normal changes in desire want to identify themselves as suffering from some medical disorder.”

WEAPONS OF MASS PRESCRIPTION
     Like all industries, the pharmaceutical industry is made up of rival firms in competition for market share. In the field of health this produces an inevitable pressure to pathologize. Men now face the prospect of getting treated for “andropause” (age-related decline in testosterone), “obesity” has gone from a risk factor to its own disease requiring pharmaceutical intervention (more on this in a future post), while the notion of “pre-hypertension” is pushing blood pressure medicine on people with normal blood pressure.
     Women have faced a long history of diseases created to pathologize and control their bodies. For centuries women were diagnosed as suffering from “hysteria”—a catch-all term uniquely imposed on women, based on the idea that their uterus (“hyster” in latin) was out of control. As one blogger has summarized:

“The symptoms of hysteria ranged from the erotic to the ludicrous and included fainting, insomnia, fluid retention, vaginal lubrication, ‘voluptuous sensations,’ and, natch, ‘a tendency to cause trouble.’ Sometimes disorders such as epilepsy, anorexia, postpartum depression, and menopause would be misdiagnosed as hysteria, but mostly ‘hysterics’ were just women with a libido and a disapproving patriarch in their lives.” 

“Treatment” varied from incarceration in asylums (more on the history of psychiatry in a later post), surgical removal of the clitoris, or forced orgasm.
     In the 20th century the medical establishment dropped “hysteria”, but  went on to universally medicate older women with Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT) on the grounds that menopause was a disorder. Pressure from women’s groups helped expose the bad science behind this, culminating in the Women’s Health Initiative showing that indiscriminate use of HRT can lead to breast cancer, heart disease, strokes, and pulmonary emboli.
     Then along came “Pre-Menstrual Dysphoric disorder”. When the patent for the anti-depressant Prozac was about to expire, Eli Lilly got a new patent for it, under a different name, for the treatment of this new “disorder”. According to feminist psychoogist Paul Caplan, "It's a label that can be used by a sexist society that wants to believe that many women go crazy once a month...Any normal hormonal change in people of either sex can exacerbate migraines, thyroid problems, etc., but no one suggests calling men's hormonal changes kinds of mental illness".  Now, with "female seual dysfunction", BigPharma has pathologized women’s sexual lives in order to further push their products.

WOMEN’S HEALTH
     This does not mean dismissing the role of medicine in women’s health, but basing it on women’s needs not pharmaceutical profits. Ironically, the creation of false medical needs runs in parallel with the denial of real needs such as abortion or HIV prevention.

     An alliance between the women’s movement and the progressive medical community struck down laws against abortion, and continues to fight for access--from promoting more teaching about abortion in med schools, to challenging Canada's minority government that wants to deny abortion rights to the 70,000 women around the world who die from unsafe abortion every year. The women's movement was at the forefront of the G20 protests, exposing Harper's war on choice and leading the 40,000 strong march with a giant coat-hanger.
     Women also continue to fight for recognition and prevention of HIV. When AIDS was first discovered it was blamed on gays and Haitians and the impact on women was ignored, resulting in many women being excluded from receiving medicine, services, and disability benefits. Women demonstrated with the slogan “women don’t get AIDS, they only die from it,” demanding the definition include conditions specific to women (like invasive cervical cancer). This succeeded in 1993 and uncovered the true statistics, as the number of women with the diagnosis of AIDS tripled. But HIV continues to be blamed on gay men and promiscuity, for which the main prevention is condoms. In 1991 a group of women working on AIDS prevention in Haiti published a text countering myths about women and AIDS, a list that needs repeating almost 20 years later:

-“AIDS is a disease of men”: the data are overwhelming: AIDS was never a disease of men. Given transmission dynamics, AIDS may in fact becoe a disease predominantly afflicting women
-“Heterosexual AIDS won’t happen": Heterosexual AIDS has already happened. Indeed, in many parts of the world, AIDS is the leading cause of death among young women.
-“women’s promiscuity causes AIDS” : most women with AIDS do not have multiple sexual partners, they have never used IV drugs, they have not received tainted blood transfusions. Their major ‘risk factor’ is being poor. For others, the risk is being married and unable to control not only their husbands but also what jobs their husbands have to perform to make a living.
-“women are AIDS vectors”: ‘women are too often perceived as agents of transmission who infect men and ‘innocent babies’. Prostitutes have been particularly hard hit by such propaganda, but prostitutes are far more vulnerable to infection that to infecting; AIDS is an ‘occupational risk’ of commercial sex work, especially in setting in which sex workers cannot safely demand their clients use condoms.’
- “condoms are panacea”: gender inequality calls into question the utility of condoms in setting in which women’s ability to insist on ‘safe sex’ is undermined by a host of less easily confronted forces. Furthermore, many HIV-positive women choose to conceive children, which means that barrier methods that prevent conception are not the answer for many. Woman-controlled viricidal preventive strategies are necessary, if women’s wishes are to be respected.

To overcome the disconnect between multibillion dollar companies medicating women for manufactured diseases while millions of women are denied basic healthcare needs, healthcare needs to base itself on the needs of people not profit. Our bodies, our choice.

Whose "risky behaviour" is really spreading syphilis?

The US administration has apologized for intentionally infecting Guatemalans with syphilis. That’s right, from 1946 to 1948 American scientists intentionally infected 700 people in Guatemala—prisoners, soldiers, and psychiatric patients—with the infectious disease syphilis, in order to study the impact of penicillin. These days syphilis is blamed on people's "risky sexual behaviour"--especially men who have sex with men--so this story is an opportunity to review the history of syphilis scapegoats (and for links to other US human experiments, check out the recent entry from this wonderful blog).

SEXISM, RACISM
     In 1918, rather than divert military spending to jobs and healthcare, US President Wilson funded the creation of detention centres, some surrounded by barbed wire and guards, for the forced quarantine of tens of thousands of women convicted of prostitution. As one government official explained (and if you want to read an excellent history of this read this source of this link, Alan Brandt's No Magic Bullet: a social history of venereal disease in the United States):

“The prevention of society against moral and social murder committed by the prostitute are functions in part of the detention house and reformatory. These functions are inextricable related to the control of the dissemination of gonorrhea and syphilis through promiscuous prostitution.”

     African-Americans were also accused of spreading syphilis through promiscuity. Whereas the prison system treated poor women like criminals, the medical system treated poor blacks like guinea pigs. From 1932 to 1972, the Tuskegee syphilis experiment deliberately gave fake medicine to 400 poor black men in Alabama who had syphilis, in order to study the long term and lethal health effects of the untreated disease—which destroys the cardiac and nervous systems. Then men were told they were getting free healthcare for their “bad blood”, and were promised free money for burials if they consented to autopsy after dying.

HOMOPHOBIA
     The scapegoat for syphilis has shifted from women, to people of colour, and now to gay men. In 2003, Vancouver’s poorest neighbourhood was struck by one of the world’s largest outbreaks of syphilis. But instead of blaming poverty and healthcare cutbacks, the response was to blame gay men. A spokesperson for the BC Centre for Disease Control claimed that “we know it spreads very quickly in the gay community. Almost every other outbreak in the world is confined to that community”. Health Canada has issued similar homophobic and medically false statements, claiming that

“risky sexual behaviour among MSM (men who have sex with men) and other populations is a risking global trend. One reflection of this is the numerous outbreaks of infectious syphilis seen worldwide. In 1995, the World Health Organization (WHO) estimated that there were 12.2 million new cases of syphilis”.

     Mainstream medicine continues to view gay sex as inherently dangerous, leading to bans on blood donations from men who have sex with men (see my post on this issue), and ridiculous statements that syphilis is only spread by gay men. The actual WHO stats show that of 12.2 million new cases, 11 million are in the global south, and a majority are women. By blaming gay men of spreading syphilis, these statements ignore conditions of poverty and inequality that put both men and women at risk of syphilis. All the homophobic hysteria about “risky sexual behaviour” is redefining a broad public health concern as a behavioural problem of a minority group. Blaming syphilis on “risky sexual behaviour” is like blaming cholera on risky drinking behaviour or blaming tuberculosis on “risky breathing behaviour” and asking people to reduce their number of conversation partners. Living in poverty and not having access to healthcare or clean water isn’t an individual behaviour, it’s collective condition imposed on millions of people.

GLOBAL TUSKEGEE EXPERIMENT
     Millions die every year of infectious disease, not because of their individual behaviour but because they are kept in poverty and denied lifesaving medicine. Tuberculosis infects a third of humanity and remains a leading infectious causes of death 50 years after the discovery of curative treatment. Treatment also exists for malaria but lack of access to it is leading to widespread deaths. And HIV now infects 40 million people and is causing a reversal of life expectancy in countries where anti-retrovirals are not available. As a result we have a global Tuskegee experiment (for a great book on this topic, read this source, Paul Farmer's Infections and Inequalities), as six million people die every year from these three epidemics not because medicine doesn’t exist but because it is denied.
     The same governments that have given billions of dollars to banks, corporations, and the military have just intentionally underfunded the Global Fund for HIV, TB, and malaria. As Medecins Sans Frontieres announced last week, “Major donor countries have chosen to undercut the main international funding mechanism to save the lives of millions of people at risk of dying from AIDS, TB, and malaria.” The Global Fund required $20 billion to expand programmes, including $13 billion just to maintain the program, but have received only $11.7 billion. Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper recently promised $18 billion for fighter jets, which could cover the $8 billion Global Fund shortfall twice over, or which could almost cover the entire Global Fund needs. But as MSF’s Dr. Jennifer Cohn declared, “world leaders have officially under-financed the Global Fund. This decision will result in the death of millions of people from otherwise treatable diseases.”
     This is the true risky behaviour that threatens public health, not diverse and healthy sexual expression but the deliberate maintenance of conditions that spread infections coupled with the deliberate denial of medicine to treat them.

Cancer awareness: stop the tar sands, good green jobs for all

October is breast cancer awareness month and last night Laureen Harper, the Prime Minister’s wife, helped cover the Parliament Buildings in pink light, as part of the Estée Lauder Companies’ Breast Cancer Awareness Global Illuminations Initiative. As she said, "Our message is simple - be vigilant and get regular mammograms. Connect, communicate and conquer."
     The welcome the government has provided to this initiative contrasts sharply with the reception they’ve provided to other groups raising awareness about Canada’s most notorious carcinogen: the tar sands. This difference shines a light on the problematic way in which cancer prevention is approached.

UNDERMINING COMMUNICATATION
     Communication is certainly important to raise awareness about cancer. But over the past year the tar sands corporations and the governments that support them have ignored or interfered with individuals and groups communicating about the carcinogenic tar sands.
     A tar sands worker was fired for exposing his working conditions on his blog! As he wrote,  “I do not think that purchasing the rights to develop oil leases over expanses of land greater than most European countries gives these corporations the right to drop a blanket of total secrecy over their operations, treatment of people, and conditions.”
     Recently local aboriginal leaders, fishermen, researchers and health professionals called attention to fish downstream of the tar sands which have tumours, while filmmaker James Cameron and NASA top scientists James Hansen have added their voice to the opposition. As Hansen stated, “it’s not that the government’s don’t know [about the consequences], but the governments are not doing anything.”
     Worse than this, provincial and federal governments are actively intervening to silence those drawing attention to tar sands cancer. Dr. John O’Connor, who for years has spoken out about despite threats, against the high rates of rare cancers in Fort Chipewyan near the tar sands, is raising alarm over a proposed provincial bylaw that would muzzle physicians who raise health issues in the media.
     Federally, after Greenpeace scaled Parliament to drop banners reading “climate inaction costs lives”, the government arrested activists and now arms its Parliament Hill officers with submachine guns. At the Copenhagen climate treaty, an indigenous-led delegation shamed Harper on the world stage for his commitment to carcinogenic tar sands. As Eriel Tchekwie Deranger, member of the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation and Tar Sands Campaigner for the Rainforest Action Network said:

“Fossil fuel extraction from the tar sands are killing our people with cancer, killing our culture by destroying our traditional lands, and killing our planet with CO2. It seems that Canada is more committed to fossil fuels than human rights or real action for the climate. Mr. Harper – We welcome you to Copenhagen because we want real action on climate, and that means shutting down the tar sands and a moratorium on new fossil fuel development.”

     Instead of shutting down the tar sands, Harper shut down Parliament—to escape popular pressure over climate change, the torture of Afghans, and the recession. But last night our tar sands government participated in a corporate-sponsored cancer awareness initiative, by a cosmetic corporation whose products may be linked to cancer. How can governments and corporations who play a role in promoting cancer feel so confident to bask in the light of cancer awareness, cynically using people’s genuine concerns to distract from their own actions? Biomedical reductionism is partly to blame.

MEDICAL DISCONNECT
     Surely the best way to conquer cancer is to understand the connections is has with modifiable aspects of our lives. But the dominance of the biomedical model decontextualizes people and their illnesses from their social and natural environments, and reduces disease to microscopic processes and individual “lifestyle choices”, for which medical intervention and “personal choices” are the only solutions. How have we done with this approach? Every year we know more about cancer and have more technology to detect and treat yet, and yet every year more people die of cancer. In fact, we are living in a pandemic of cancer: in the 1930s one in ten people developed cancer, in the 1970s it was up to one in five, and now more than one in three. While cancer was once uncommon, we now all have close family and friends with cancer.
     The failure of the biomedical approach to explain and prevent cancer is often attributed to success, with the increase in cancer attributed to better screening or living longer, as if we’re naturally pre-programmed to develop cancer. But the vast majority of cancers are not genetic (only 5% of breast cancers), many cannot be screened for (like pancreatic or lung cancer) and this level of increase far outpaces the impact of aging. I see people with cancer on a daily basis and many are less than 50—including a 30 year old man I diagnosed a few months ago with colon cancer, and a 40 year woman I just saw who died of vulvar cancer.
     This is not to say medicine does not play an important role. In fact, while there is a tremendous amount of time and resources that go into finding “the cure” for cancer, many medical advances already exist. Many cancers in the Global South are due to chronic infections for which prevention and treatment are already known but are denied due to poverty and pharmaceutical patents. Cervical cancer and much liver cancer could be prevented with access to pap smears and vaccines. Some forms of bladder cancer are caused by water-born infections that could be prevented through access to safe drinking water. The widespread availability of antiretrovirals could diminish the number of people who develop HIV-associated cancers.
     When it comes to prevention, the dominant medical model is highly selective in what carcinogens it chooses to blame. The continual rise in lung cancer is blamed solely on the dissemination of cigarettes, but cigarettes are not the only chemical to enter existence over the last century. According to the Canadian Auto Workers Prevent Cancer Campaign:

“The International Agency for the Research of Cancer has identified 24 substances that cause lung cancer in humans. Twenty-three were determined by the excess mortality of workers who were exposed to these substances. The 24th, of course, is tobacco. Why do we hear so much about the dangers of tobacco but so little about the other 23 lung carcinogens? The reason is that tobacco is claimed to be a “lifestyle” choice, so industry and the medical profession can blame the victims. The other 23 known causes of lung cancer are related to industry. They can be prevented and removed from our workplaces and our environment.”

     Since breast cancer is sensitive to estrogen, all the focus on “risk factors” are about an individual’s reproductive cycle—menstruation, conception, breastfeeding, menopause. So it came as a surprise in 2006 when a Canadian study found that women working on farms and automotive industry are far more likely to develop breast cancer. It turns out that many chemicals, like pesticides, act like estrogens in the body and increase the risk of breast cancer. When the medical model reduces women to reproductive organs, it misses the threats they face as workers in toxic environments. As the CAW guide summarizes, this is not restricted to farm or auto workers:

“Workers in certain carcinogen-laden industries are contracting cancer at rates well beyond those experienced by the general population. At least 60 different occupations have been identified as posing as increased cancer risk. Studies show that the auto industry is producing laryngeal, stomach, and colorectal cancers along with its cars. The steel industry is producing lung cancer along with its metal products. Miners experience respiratory cancers many times higher than expected. Electrical workers are suffering increased rates of brain cancer and leukemeia. Aluminum smelter workers are contracting bladder cancer. Dry cleaners have elevated rates of digestive tract cancers. Firefighters contract brain and blood-related cancers at many times the expected levels. Women in the plastics and rubber industry are at greater risk for uterine cancer and possibly breast cancer. The list goes on and on.”

CONQUER CANCER: SHUT DOWN THE TAR SANDS, GOOD GREEN JOBS FOR ALL
     By seeing cancer connected to our natural and social environments, our vigilance does not have to be reduced to screening for cancers, but can be expanded to widespread prevention—by providing access to the medical advances that treat infectious precursors to cancer, and by developing an economy based on safe and environmentally sustainable work.  So let’s expand the scope of the pink light, not only on Parliament but on the government’s toxic devotion to tar sands, and on our carcinogenic economy. Cancer prevention must include shutting down the tar sands, and expanding green jobs to save the planet and its people.

Thought for Food: two great books on the politics of food

Below are reviews of two great books I've read on the politics of food, an issue around which an increasing number of people are radicalizing.

IN DEFENSE OF FOOD, by Michael Pollan

     Common explanations of the unhealthy “Western diet” blame fast food companies and gluttonous consumers. But for Michael Pollan, the problem is the commodification of food under capitalism, which harms the earth and humans: the increasing geographical separation of food production and consumption robs the soil of nutrients, and the profit-driven processing of food then purges those nutrients. This has produced “a radical and abrupt set of changes over the course of the last 150 years, not just to our foodstuffs but also to our food relationships, all the way from the soil to the meal”.
     In Defense of Food focuses on the “nutritional industrial complex” that has emerged in recent years: governments deregulate food production, marketers sell artificial food as healthy, and scientists provide the ideological justifications.
Pollan explains how food is “a virtual wilderness of chemical compounds, many of which exist in intricate and dynamic relation to one another, and all of which together are in the process of changing from one state to another”. He contrasts this with the “official ideology of the Western diet”, nutritionism, which reduces food to a static and simple collection of individual nutrients. As a consequence fertilizers ignore and sabotage the earth’s own ability to feed plants, sapping their quality; attempts to simplistically create food produces toxic alternatives; and reducing food to a delivery mechanism for nutrients undermines its cultural diversity and pleasure. Pollan concludes with a series of steps to regain a healthy diet, summed up with his maxim: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”
    While In Defense of Food provides a brilliant analysis of food under capitalism, it doesn’t provide a very effective solution: “Not everyone can afford to eat high-quality food in America, and that is shameful; however, those of us who can, should. Doing so benefits not only your health, but also the health of the people who grow the food as well as the people who live downstream and downwind of the farms where it is grown.”
    The problem is that Pollan sees humans and the planet relating to each other primarily through the act of consumption, rather than production—relegating those who actually produce the food to a passive role. But if those workers and others had democratic control over the production, they could consciously grow food in ways that are healthy for humans and the earth.
While In Defense of Food does not provide this ultimate solution, it takes the first step by showing us how food is “no mere thing but a web of relationships among a great many living beings, some of them human, some not, but each of them dependent on the other, and all of them ultimately rooted in soil and nourished by sunlight”.

SOIL NOT OIL, by Vandana Shiva

     In her latest book, renowned scientist and environmental activist Vandana Shiva shows capitalism is the root of the climate crisis, and its profit-driven solutions will only makes things worse.
In this short and accessible book, Shiva blends science and politics to analyze three crises—climate chaos, peak oil, and the food crisis—showing how they are interconnected and based on two centuries of an unsustainable quest for profits that drives people off the land and privatizes nature.
     She looks back on the results of the “Green Revolution”, which claimed to promote food security but instead concentrated a monoculture of climate-sensitive crops in the hands of oil-dependent corporations, whose production and use poisons the earth and promotes climate change, and whose expensive patented seeds and fertilizers creates huge debt that has produced an epidemic of farmer suicides.
     Now we are presented with a new series of pseudo-solutions—nuclear power, carbon trading, and biofuels—that will only exacerbate the climate crisis. As Shiva points out, “nuclear winter is not an alternative to global warming.”
     Shiva shows how these pseudo-solutions are rooted in capitalism’s incessant commodification: “some things should not be tradable—water and biodiversity are too valuable to be reduced to marketable commodities. Other things, like toxic waste and greenhouse gases, should not be generated. To turn them into tradable commodities ensures that they will continue to be produced. Instead of putting a value on clean air, emissions trading schemes value pollution”.
Meanwhile, the production of biofuels drives communities and trees off the land, and uses oil and large amounts of water to divert food production into crops to run cars, while wild speculation on these profits drives up food prices and creates artificial famines.
     For Shiva, the solution will come from the periphery of the system and a focus on small farms: “the solution to the climate crisis begins with the cultures and communities who have not contributed to it”. While she condemns capitalism for two centuries of driving people off the land into polluting cities, she does not articulate a role for the urban working class in fighting back. She claims that “as the fossil fuel economy has grown, it has substituted energy for humans”, rendering “humans redundant to the economic process”, and “replacing people with fossil-fuel driven machines”. Seeing no contradiction in capitalism, she calls for a “cultural transition” with an appeal to a mystical energy force.
     But machines do not run themselves, they run on human labour, and the working class has the collective power to bring the system that produces climate chaos to a halt. The 100 million workers in India who struck at the start of the month—shutting down coal, power, port, and road transportation—show how the working class can be a key ally of peasant communities fighting climate choas.
     Despite this shortcoming, Soil not Oil is valuable reading for anyone seeking to understand the climate crisis and the dangers of profit-driven solutions

capitalism + climate change + war = disaster in Pakistan

The massive floods in Pakistan that affect 20 million people are far from a random “natural disaster”. Rather, they are a predictable result of global warming, capitalist development, and US-backed war.

There have been 12 major floods in Pakistan since 1973, and three years ago the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned of worse floods to come due to global warming. 2010 is the hottest year in recorded history, which has brought Russia’s worst heat wave, massive forest fires in BC, a huge ice island to break off Greenland’s glacier, and devastating floods in China and Pakistan. The current floods that have inundated one fifth of Pakistan have displaced one million people, killed 2,000, partially or totally destroyed 722,000 homes, and raised the threat of a cholera epidemic.

This disaster is not simply from record monsoon rainfall but the country it landed on, which has been decimated by profit-driven “development”. According to Riaz Ahmed, a socialist based in Karachi: “Cities like Mianwali and Charsadda have been allowed to drown in order to save dams and hydroelectric stations. Military installations have been saved, but entire villages have been submerged because budget cuts have meant the loss of vital riverbank defences. And forests and jungles have been plundered by millionaire-owned timber businesses. This has created soil erosion and the destruction of natural defenses that can prevent flooding. Local and national governments have awarded the contracts for this kind of work, knowing the dangers.”

Rescue-workers are unable to reach 600,000 in the Swat valley, where the flood waters have inundated a region weakened by war. Last year the Pakistani military launched a war against resistance movements in the Swat valley, trying to clear a path for the US to its bases in Afghanistan. Obama has followed up with drone attacks, which have continued despite the humanitarian catastrophe. These combined attacks have destroyed bridges and roads, and displaced vast numbers into refugee camps.

The “war on terror” helped create the current disaster, and is now undermining relief efforts. In the first few days of flooding Pakistan’s President Zardari was on a European tour pledging loyalty to the “war on terror”, and refused to cut it short—leading many to call the floods “Zardari’s Katrina”. The United Nations has appealed for $460 million for relief, but the same countries spreading climate change and war refuse to meet that goal. The US, the world’s largest polluter, provides Pakistan with $1 billion in military aid that has been used to bomb its own country, but initially only offered $10 million for flood relief. Meanwhile, the Harper government, which promotes the environmentally destructive Tar Sands and promises $18 billion for new fighter jets, initially only pledged $2 million for humanitarian relief.[5] Islamophobia surrounding the “war on terror” has weakened donations, but still an outpouring of support has pressured Western powers to increase their pledges.

The people of Pakistan need not only urgent humanitarian aid, but an end to war and climate change, and an economy that puts people and the planet above profits.