Breaking the code about WWII

Building support for the latest US war, Hollywood seems bound by a code to produce at least a movie a year glorifying World War II by portraying the Allied countries as bastions of human liberation. By telling the true story of Alan Turing, The Imitation Game has broken the code.

Turing was a British mathematician who worked at Bletchley Park, a secret centre for cryptographers who were trying to break the German Enigma code—allowing the Allies to read Nazi military communications. By designing a machine that could rapidly process information, Turing broke the code—which ended the war an estimated two years sooner, saving millions of lives—and through the process laid the foundation for modern computers.

How was Turing rewarded? The British state drove him to suicide, and wrote him out of history, for being gay. He was persecuted in 1952 with the same law that destroyed Oscar Wilde, avoided prison only by agreeing to be chemically castrated, and ate a cyanide-laced apple in 1954 (urban legend claims Apple’s original logo of a rainbow apple is an homage to Turing).

Reviving Turing

The Imitation Game intertwines Turing’s early life as a schoolboy, his work breaking the code, and his post-war persecution. Benedict Cumberbatch could win a well-earned Oscar for his portrayal of Turing, and took the role in order to restore Turing’s place in history. As he explained, “The feeling you have for the man after getting to know him through the duration of the film is really exacerbated by the frustration and anger, not just at the injustice served him, but also at the fact that, why don’t I know this story? It seems unbelievable that someone who is a war hero, someone who is the father of the modern computer age—and a gay icon—could remain in such relative obscurity to the scale of his achievements in his brief time on this planet. One of the main reasons I was really attracted to playing him was to try and bring his story to as wide an audience as possible.”

Bringing Turing to the big screen is a process that has taken decades. In 1983 Andrew Hodges wrote his biography, Alan Turing: the Enigma, which was adapted for the stage—and portrayed by the brilliant Derek Jacobi in the 1996 BBC film Breaking the Code (available on Youtube). In 2011 the new screenplay was voted the top of the Hollywood Black List—representing the best unproduced films in Hollywood—and was finally released this year.

Bringing Turing’s life to film has been part of a campaign to challenge his persecution. In 2009 the British government issued a posthumous apology but in 2012 refused to pardon him—and the other 49,000 gay men criminalized under the former law. Justice Minister, Lord McNally, claimed, “A posthumous pardon was not considered appropriate as Alan Turing was properly convicted of what at the time was a criminal offense.” The Queen issued a royal pardon to Turing last year, but as Cumberbatch said, “It’s an insult for anybody of authority or standing to sign off on him with their approval and say, ‘Oh, he’s forgiven.’ The only person who should be (doing the) forgiving is Turing, and he can’t because we killed him. And it makes me really angry. It makes me very angry.”

The film also has a strong performance from Keira Knightly as Joan Clarke, who worked at Bletchley and was briefly engaged to Turing. (The BBC mini-series The Bletchley Circle is another recent attempt to recount the role of women cryptographers, including the sexism after WWII that drove them back into the home.) The Imitation Game has been criticized for over playing their relationship and not showing Turing’s relationships with men (unlike the 1996 film). The film also reinforces the myth of the solitary genius, ignoring the role of Polish code-breakers in providing their initial work on Enigma to the British.

WWII: the good war?

As Cumberbatch said, “To think that a society and a democracy—that Turing could save from fascism in the second World War—rewarded him with that (punishment) is the most sickening irony of all.” But this irony pervades the history of WWII. Films that glorify WWII use the horrors of Nazism to obscure an understanding of how fascism arose, whitewash the history of the Allied countries, and pave the way for more Western intervention.

Fascism did not emerge from the deranged mind of Hitler but from the economic crisis of capitalism (which has reappeared and giving rise to new fascist parties across Europe), and the defeat of the workers’ movement in challenging it. Before WWII it was clear what the Allies thought of Hitler: Ford and General Motors collaborated with the Nazis, Hitler was Time Magazine’s “man of the year,” and Germany was rewarded with the Olympics. When Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King met Hitler in 1937 he described him as “one who truly loves his fellow man.” While many on the left supported the fight against fascism in Spain in the 1930s, the future Allied powers had a policy of non-intervention—while those who went to fight fascism in Spain were labeled “premature anti-fascists.”

WWII has been called a “war for freedom and democracy,” but at the time the US was running it apartheid Jim Crow system, Canada has its concentration camps—the residential schools—and both countries interned families of Japanese descent, and turned away boats of Jewish refugees fleeing the Holocaust. Canada had the same homophobic laws as Britain, criminalized abortion and had eugenics programs in BC and Alberta based on forcible sterilization. Meanwhile Britain and France were repressing their colonies while sending their soldiers to die. (France belatedly acknowledged the role of Algerian soldiers, documented in the movie Days of Glory). The Allies refused to bomb the train tracks to Auschwitz, and carried out their own atrocities—from the firebombing of Dresden to the atomic bombing of Japan.

After the war the US recruited Nazi scientists like Werner von Braun, while Britain supported fascists in Greece. The WWII mythology around Churchill erases the rest of his career, including sending troops against British miners in 1910, using chemical weapons against Iraqis in 1920, and after WWII supporting fascists in Greece. As a recent article in The Guardian pointed out, Churchill “switched allegiances to back the supporters of Hitler against his own erstwhile allies.”

The Imitation Game leaves the impression that the persecution of Alan Turing was an isolated abnormality in an otherwise noble war effort—instead of a symptom of imperial rivals bombing each other while repressing their own citizens. But by breaking the official code of WWII, The Imitation Game encourages us to learn more, and to challenge the bigotry on which war depends.

Myths and facts about the Muslim prayer space

There’s growing hysteria against the prayer space for Muslim students at the Valley Park Middle School in Toronto. It’s claimed that it gives special treatment to Muslims, undermines public education and imposes sexism on society, and that we should support a supposedly broad-based multifaith coalition that opposes it. But this is based on a series of myths.

MYTH: the prayer space gives special treatment to Muslims and undermines secularism

FACT: the prayer spaces promotes secularism by providing equal access to public education

According to Toronto District School Board Education (TDSB) Director Chris Spence: “As a public school board, we have a responsibility and an obligation to accommodate faith needs.” With its weekends and vacations, the school calendar already accommodates students who pray on Saturday or Sunday, and those who observe Easter and Christmas. Furthermore, as Omar Qayum, a TDSB teacher pointed out,

“At my school we have Christian invocations every year during our Remembrance Day assemblies and during the Christmas holidays through carols- nobody complains! Furthermore, some schools partake in Hanukah, Diwali and Kwanza to honour their Jewish, Hindu and African-American students.”

The prayer space for Muslim students ensures that they are not excluded and forced to choose between their education and their faith. Rather than demanding the canceling of Friday classes or having Muslim students miss class, the Friday prayer space ensures no disruption to non-Muslim students while promoting access to education for Muslim students. This is the essence of secularism: equal access to public services irrespective of religion.

Banning prayer spaces undermines this principle, and there’s a history of such discrimination towards Muslims. As an article in the Ottawa Citizen reminds us:

“It's the same as the flap about civil arbitration back in 2005. For more than a decade, the government of Ontario had a system that permitted Orthodox Christians and Jews to settle family disputes according to their faith's rules provided the outcome did not violate generally applicable laws and principles. Not controversial in the least. Then a handful of Muslims asked to do the same, there was a mighty backlash, and the government scrapped the whole system.”

MYTH: the prayer space undermines public education

FACT: opposition to the prayer space is scapegoating Muslims for government cuts

The Toronto Sun claimed, that “the taxpayers are funding religious schools after all. Or at least one that we know of. If it’s not stopped now who knows where this will end up or how much it will cost.”

Firstly, taxpayers are not funding a separate Muslim prayer space, it is happening in the existing school cafeteria, organized and paid for by the local Muslim community. Secondly, we know of many religious schools that receive public funding: Catholic schools, which segregate boys and girls not only in separate prayer spaces but in separate schools.

Most importantly, the erosion of quality public education is not because of accommodation to religious minorities. Prayer spaces have not reduced education budgets and extra-curricular activities, or increased class sizes, budget cuts have. It’s no coincidence that minorities are being scapegoated in times of economic crisis and austerity measures. Britain’s conservative government is imposing massive cuts to jobs and services, including the tripling of university tuition. At the same time it’s blaming “multiculturalism” and giving confidence to extremist groups like the English Defense League who target Muslims.

MYTH: the prayer space is imposing segregation on education and society

FACT: Muslims are being scapegoated for segretation that pervades society and all its institutions

The hysteria against the prayer space gives the impression that girls and women would be liberated were it not for an optional weekly half hour Muslim prayer at one school. But segregation of the sexes exists in all religions—including the segregation of menstruating women in some orthodox Jewish communities. As Aisha Sherazi, a formal principal wrote recently, “Growing up in a Hindu family, men and women always sat separately…It is up to the Muslim community to have a debate about whether they want to have mixed prayer or not.” But the islamophobic campaign against the prayer space does not open up space for this debate, it closes it.

Furthermore the campaign suggests segregation is isolated to Muslim prayer space. But throughout society women face segregation—in pay, reproductive choice, media images that shame their bodies, and levels of violence. Campaigns in Western countries against Muslims are scapegoating them for these far broader forms of segregation, while denying that Muslim women have any agency in their own lives. In France where less than 25% of MPs are women, the government has claimed to liberate women by banning those who wear niqab from public space.

In Canada the federal Harper government refuses to investigate missing and murdered Aboriginal women, purged funding from women’s groups, imposed a maternal health plan that denies reproductive choice, and told women's groups to "shut the fuck up". As women are segregated into lower socio-economic status, Toronto Mayor Rob Ford's massive proposal of cuts will disproportionately hurt those who rely on city services--from bus routes to dental care. Why aren’t the groups up in arms over prayer space organizing protests against these policies of segregation affecting far broader population?

MYTH: a broad multi-faith coalition opposes the prayer space

FACT:  a small number of fringe groups with a history of Islamophobia oppose the prayer space

Far from being a large multi-faith opposition, the main organized opposition to the prayer space are fringe political groups with a history of Islamophobia: the Jewish Defense League (an extremist Zionist group), the Christian Heritage Party (a fringe right-wing party that calls for a moratorium on immigration from Muslim countries, and that opposes women’s choice), the Canadian Hindu Advocacy (a Hindu nationalist group whose spokesperson claimed that Islamic civilization had contributed “less to human advancement than a pack of donkeys”) and the Muslim Canadian Congress (a small group whose spokeperson Tarek Fatah has become a media darling for supporting campaigns against religious accommodation for Muslims).

It’s obvious that what unites these groups is not their love of public education or their commitment to women’s rights, but their Islamophobia. Despite their fringe numbers and beliefs, the media has helped them spark a hysterical reaction against an optional weekly half hour of prayer that doesn’t interfere with non-Muslims and which allow Muslim students to better integrate into public school—but which like all religions and most of society has some form of segregation. These groups are trying to import the politics of David Cameron and the English Defense League, paying lip service to women’s rights and public education as an excuse to whip up Islamophobia, providing a scapegoat to economic crisis and austerity.

The bombs in Afghanistan have landed in Norway

A decade of Islamophobia to justify the war in Afghanistan is now spreading violence to the West. Right-wing Islamophobe Anders Behring Breivik has killed 91 people in Norway, through the explosion of a bomb near the Prime Minister's building and a shooting spree in a youth camp organized by the Workers’ Youth League.

     The initial response by international media was to blame Muslims. But when the alleged perpetrator turned out to be a blond-hair, blue-eyed Norwegian Christian nationalist, some are now denying there’s any context whatsoever for the killing. As a Norwegian official said, "It seems it's not Islamic-terror related. This seems like a madman's work." 

     But Breiviks was not driven by "madness", he was driven by right-wing Islamophobic politics. From 1997 to 2007 he was a member of the xenophobic "Progress Party". Since that time police chief Sveinung Sponheim describe his internet postings as having “some political traits directed toward the right, and anti-Muslim views”, and others have pointed out his an admirer of prominent anti-Muslim individuals and organizations like Geert Wilders and the English Defense League.

ISLAMOPHOBIA

     Islamophobia existed well before the terror attacks of 9/11. After the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995 (orchestrated by Gulf War veteran and right-wing extremist Timothy McVeigh), the media blamed Muslims, and the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee documented death threats against Muslims and vandalism of mosques. But for the past decade there has been a surge in Islamophobia to scapegoat populations at home and justify wars abroad.

     The Western countries with Islamophobic policies overlaps with those occupying Afghanistan: from the US (which incarcerated Muslims without trial in Guantanamo Bay), to Canada (which has rounded up Muslim men and pressured them to admit to terrorism, while Muslim Canadians have been abandoned abroad, and media have amplified fringe-group campaigns against prayer spaces), to France (which is banning girls who wear hijab from school, and women who wear niqab from public space), to Norway.

     The website Islamophobia-watch has documented anti-Muslim racism around the world, which in Norway includes:

-2006: the Directorate for Primary and Secondary Education of Norway banned girls and women wearing niqab form school

 -2007: anti-immigration politicians in Bergen threatened to use pigs feet to chase praying Muslims out of a public square.

-2009: the Norwegian government tried to ban female police officers from wearing the hijab

-April 2011: attempts were made to set up a Norwegian Defense League—modeled on the English Defense League--with a demonstration was called against the “Islamic occupation of Noway”. While only 10-15 Islamophobes turned up, up to 1000 people attended a counter-demonstration

-May 2011: a school in Bergen had to be evacuated when a national newspaper received a message threatening “A massacre at Gimle school Bergen. Everyone that stands in the way will die, especially Muslims”

     But police have refused to see Islamophobia as a threat. “It’s surprising, because the Norwegian police have long said that the right wing extremist community was under control,” said Hegghammer, of the Norwegian Defense Research Establishment.

FIGHT POVERTY, RACISM AND MILITARISM

     As Martin Luther King famously said:

demo against the Norwegian Defense League, April 2011

“The bombs in Vietnam explode at home. They destroy the hopes and possibilities for a decent America. If we reversed investments and gave the armed forces the anti-poverty budget, the generals could be forgiven if they walked off the battlefield in disgust. Poverty, urban problems and social progress generally are ignored when the guns of war become a national obsession.”

     The horrific crimes of Anders Behring Breivik have exposed the consequences of war and Islamophobia, which are intensifying in the economic crisis. To counter this we must follow the words of King: 

"Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism."

10 myths busted by the Egyptian revolution

The Egyptian revolution has busted 10 key myths about society, the “war on terror”, and social transformation. We’re told that ordinary people can’t run society, that we need a police force to maintain order and that change comes from above. We’re told that Muslims and Christians can’t get along, that Muslim women are passive victims in need of liberation, and that the “war on terror” is necessary to spread democracy to the Middle East. When the revolution erupted it was presented as a spontaneous event, in which the people and the army were one and notions of class were a thing of the past, and as an event that unique to Egypt. The ongoing Egyptian revolution is busting all these myths.

MYTH 1: MUSLIMS AND CHRISTIANS CAN’T GET ALONG

For a decade the world has suffered through a “war on terror” based on a “clash of fundamentalisms” that presents Muslims as inherently violent and incapable of unity with Christians. But what beautiful photos have emerged from Tahrir Square to challenge this myth, photos of Christian protesters protecting Muslim protesters while they pray on Friday—an act of solidarity reciprocated on Sunday during Christian prayer.

MYTH 2: MUSLIM WOMEN ARE PASSIVE VICTIMS
    The “war on terror” has resurrected the White Man’s Burden, seeing Muslims as “half devil and half child”. The infantilizing half of this equation is especially applied to Muslim women, who are presented as passive victims incapable of their own emancipation, who must be liberated by force. The near decade-long occupation of Afghanistan was first launched and recently extended based on this racist and sexist notion. But it has been abundantly clear—from photos of women leading the demonstrations or youtube clips of women in hijabs shaming the riot police—that Muslim women are leading the fight for their own liberation, and for their country.

MYTH 3: WESTERN GOVERNMENTS SUPPORT DEMOCRACY
    Another justification for the “war on terror” is that West governments want to spread democracy to the region. Besides the massive arms deals to dictators in the region—from $282 million to Tunisia, to more than a billion annually to Egypt, to a recent $60 billion arms deal to Saudi Arabia—this notion was called into question five years ago when Western leaders responded to democratic elections in Gaza by cutting humanitarian aid.
     In the past month, Western governments were caught openly supporting dictators—from the French foreign minister offering to help Ben Ali "appease the situaion through law enforcement techniques", to former British Prime Minister Tony Blair defending Mubarak as "immensely courageous and a force for good", to Obama’s refusal to cut military aid to the dictatorship. Even when the US was forced to concede that Mubarak had to go, the Canadian and Israeli governments continued to support him.

MYTH 4: CHANGE COMES FROM ABOVE
    We’re told that change comes from above—from Parliament in social democratic countries, or through military intervention in dictatorships—both based on the idea that ordinary people can’t fun society, and that specialists in suits or uniforms must change society for them. Eight to ten years of occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan—costing a million lives and billions of dollars while undermining living standards—show the success of this strategy of dealing with tyrants. The people of Egypt have shown in 18 days how mass movements from below can deal far more peaceful and powerful change.

MYTH 5: POLICE ARE NEEDED TO STOP VIOLENCE
    During the uprising there was a direct correlation between police presence and violence: people were shot when police tried to crack down on the initial uprising, then there was peace and calm when the police forces melted away, then violence returned when plain-clothed police attacked Tahrir Square, then violence stopped after they were repelled.
    That doesn’t mean it was a completely nonviolent revolution. Protesters burnt down police vehicles and the NDP party headquarters, and defended themselves with rocks and molatov cocktails. But whereas police violence lashed out at demonstrators to squash the pro-democracy movement, protester force was strategically directed at the repressive regime, playing an important role in defending the revolution.

MYTH 6: ORDINARY PEOPLE CAN’T RUN THE WORLD
    The most inspiring lesson of Tahrir Square is that ordinary people can run society. Egyptians self-organized to provide medicine, security, food, childcare, sanitation, literacy, and communication—without bosses, the police, the courts, or parliament—offering a glimpse of what a better world could look like.
  
MYTH 7: REVOLUTION IS PURELY SPONTANEOUS
    The media portrayed the Egyptian revolution as a spontaneous event without organization. Spontaneity certainly played a role, but it didn’t happen in a vacuum. As Mona El-Ghobashy  explained,

“There’s a pre-history to this revolt. Egyptian politics didn’t begin on January 25th… we have to link it to the fabric of Egyptian politics starting in 2000, for simplicity’s sake, but protests actually occurred in the 1990s, as well. One of the largest protests was a quarry workers’ strike in 1996 that really shook the country at the time.”

     After that there were mass protests in 2003, as part of the global movement against the Iraq War, including tens of thousands of people who occupied Tahrir Square; the following year the Kifayah (“enough”) movement against Mubarak was born; these political movements fed into economic battles, producing strike waves triggered by women textile workers in Mahalla in 2006 (for an account of the strike wave, watch this video), which connected economic demands with solidarity with Palestine and freedom of assembly. These years of organizing created the experience and networks that combined with the spark of the Tunisian revolution to detonate mass resistance across Egyptian society.

MYTH 8: WORKERS ARE NOT CENTRAL TO REVOLUTIONARY MOVEMENTS
     In Tunisia, protests began with an unemployed student self-immolating and spread to involve all sectors from peasants to lawyers. While the organized working class was not the first to take action, it was the most decisive: it was the general strike that finally drove Ben Ali from the country. The same process unfolded in Egypt, where all classes took part in the Tahrir Square protests but workers played a key role in ousting Mubarak. According to Hossam El-Hamalawy,

“All classes in Egypt took part in the uprising. Mubarak managed to alienate all social classes in society. In Tahrir Square, you found sons and daughters of the Egyptian elite, together with the workers, middle-class citizens and the urban poor. But remember that it's only when the mass strikes started on Wednesday that the regime started crumbling and the army had to force Mubarak to resign because the system was about to collapse.”

The mass strike unites economic and political demands and propels revolutions forward, a dynamic identified 95 years ago by the German revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg:

“Every new onset and every fresh victory of the political struggle is transformed into a powerful impetus for the economic struggle, extending at the same time its external possibilities and intensifying the inner urge of the workers to better their position and their desire to struggle. After every foaming wave of political action a fructifying deposit remains behind from which a thousand stalks of economic struggle shoot forth. And conversely. The workers’ condition of ceaseless economic struggle with the capitalists keeps their fighting energy alive in every political interval; it forms, so to speak, the permanent fresh reservoir of the strength of the proletarian classes, from which the political fight ever renews its strength, and at the same time leads the indefatigable economic sappers of the proletariat at all times, now here and now there, to isolated sharp conflicts, out of which public conflicts on a large scale unexpectedly explode. In a word: the economic struggle is the transmitter from one political centre to another; the political struggle is the periodic fertilisation of the soil for the economic struggle.”

MYTH 9: THE ARMY AND THE PEOPLE ARE ONE
    It is for this reason that the military high command, reflecting the ruling elites in Egypt, have so quickly called for strikes to end, which would stop the beating heart of the revolution. While rank and file soldiers have identified and joined with the demonstrators, the high command is intent on restricting the revolution, reflecting a class divide in Egypt that will become more apparent at time goes on. As El-Hamalawy explains,

“Thousands of public transport workers were staging protests in el-Gabal el-Ahmar. The temporary workers at Helwan Steel Mills are also protesting. The railway technicians continue to bring trains to a halt. Thousands of workers at the el-Hawamdiya sugar factory are protesting and oil workers announced a strike on Sunday over work conditions. Nearly every single sector in the Egyptian economy has witnessed either strikes or mass protests. Even sections of the police have joined in. At this point, the Tahrir Square occupation is to be suspended. We have to take Tahrir to the factories now. As the revolution proceeds, an inevitable class polarisation will take place. We have to be vigilant. We hold the keys to the liberation of the entire region, not just Egypt. Onwards we must go, with a permanent revolution that will empower the people of this country with direct democracy from below.”

MYTH 10: IT CAN’T HAPPEN HERE
    The Egyptian revolution is part of resistance movements sweeping the globe in response to the economic crisis. Each new outburst catches governments and media off guard, and is quickly explained away as an isolated incident, only to erupt somewhere new. Protests and strikes have spread across Europe (from Greece and Ireland to France and Britain), South Africa, India, and Thailand. Now we're seeing how economic crisis can trigger political crisis, with resistance against austerity combining with longstanding anger against repression and corruption. The Tunisian spark has ignited the Egyptian detonator, triggering revolt across Jordan, Yemen, Algeria, Bahrain, Iran, and Djibouti.
    How far and how deep this resistance spreads is an open question, and that’s what’s so exciting.

HARPER = threat to health

“I’ve been here for five hours,” a patient shouted at the end of my shift, and they were not alone. Working in an ER I see the individuals behind the overcrowding statistics, and the conditions to which patients and healthcare providers are subjected—long waits, being short staffed, assessing and treating patients in the waiting room, admitting people to a hallway. I recently saw someone with a bleed in their brain who left the hospital because they couldn’t stand having to sleep in the hallway.  Last week a man died in an ER waiting room in Montreal, while Alberta ER doctors are also sounding the alarm.

OVERCROWDED, UNDERFUNDED
     Ten years ago the Canadian Association of Emergency Physicians identified ER overcrowding as “a national problem” and “a chronic state in many departments”. They diagnosed this as symptom of the broader healthcare system: “increased waiting times for transfer to an inpatient bed has become the most important cause of Emergency Department overcrowding. Over the past 5 years, hospital beds in Canada have been reduced by almost 40 percent nationally”. According to the Canadian Health Coalition, there were 64,000 hospital bed cuts between 1988 and 2002 and this has not visibly changed for the better since then. This is not because healthcare is unsustainable but because it is underfunded, at both federal and provincial levels.

WHERE’S THE BAILOUT FOR HEALTHCARE?
    

What’s more frustrating is that this unacceptable situation persists despite available resources. Prime Minister Harper did not create this situation, but he (along with provincial governments) in choosing to ignore it. Instead of spending $1 billion on health, he spent it on the biggest mass arrest in Canadian history. Instead of building much needed hospitals, he is spending $9 billion to build prisons despite a falling crime rate, and $18 billion to build fighter jets when most Canadians are opposed to the war. Instead of bailout out healthcare, he is bailing out corporations with $47 billion in corporate tax cuts. 

H.A.R.P.E.R. AGENDA
     ER overcrowding from underfunding is the most visible way in which the government is neglecting our health. But in a broader sense, patterns have emerged over the years of a government agenda that does not just ignore health, but actively undermines it. In the field of health, HARPER has come to stand for:

Humanitarian aid politicization: the Harper government has repeatedly undermined health in Palestine—making Canada the first to cut humanitarian aid to the Palestinian Authority, the first to cut funding to UNRWA that provides healthcare to refugee camps, and the first to criminalize George Galloway for delivering ambulances, food, and medicine. It’s no wonder this bias cost Canada a UN Security Council seat for the first time. In addition, the government militarized aid to Haiti, while practically ignoring the catastrophic floods in Pakistan. The cost of G20 security could have twice covered the $460 million that the UN requested—and has still not received—for health security in Pakistan.

AIDS facilitation: While 25 million people have died of AIDS worldwide and 40 million live with HIV, Harper refused to attend the 2006 International AIDS Conference in Toronto, preferring to tour military bases in the arctic. As UN envoy Stephen Lewis said at the time:

“In a very real way it's a slap in the face to the international community of activists and scientists and researchers and advocates and agencies all gathered to deal with the single greatest problem on the planet… it's just profoundly inappropriate and I think it's a measure of the government's commitment to (fighting) the disease."

     This year, Harper renewed this inappropriate commitment by quietly joining others in underfunding the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria. As Dr. Jennifer Cohn, MSF HIV/AIDS Policy Advisor said a few weeks ago:

“Today marks a sad turning point in the fight against AIDS, TB, and malaria: world leaders have officially under-financed the Global Fund. This decision will result in the death of millions of people from otherwise treatable diseases.”

     The cost of new fighter jets—built to destroy life—could cover twice over the $8 billion shortfall required to save lives.

Reproductive health prejudice: Conservative MPs introduced two anti-choice bills in 2006 and one in 2008. This year the Harper government is imposing its anti-choice agenda on women in the developing world with a “maternal health plan” that specifically excludes abortion services. According to the Lancet, one the world’s leading medical journals,

“This omission is no accident, but a conscious decision by Canada's Conservative Government not to support groups that undertake abortions in developing countries. This stance must change. 70,000 women die from unsafe abortions worldwide every year… Canada and the other G8 nations could show real leadership with a final maternal health plan that is based on sound scientific evidence and not prejudice.”

Psychological/physical trauma: The Harper government has been complicit in traumatizing detentions of Canadians: delaying repatriation, not apologizing for torture, and maintaining “security certificates”. The government has also been complicit in abuses overseas—transferring Afghan detainees to torture, and deporting US Iraq War resisters to jail for refusing to participate in war crimes.  Harper justifies these policies by claiming to support our troops, but he has silenced those advocating for their healthcare—from Veterans’ Ombudsman Col. Strogan, to veteran advocate Capt. Sean Bruyea—while ignoring military families who oppose the extension of the mission. 

Environmental pollution

While climate change leads to 300,000 deaths a year, Harper abandoned Canada’s Kyoto obligations and has supported tar sands that lead to global pollution and local cancer epidemics for First Nations communities. When Greenpeace dropped banners on Parliament to raise awareness of the health impact of climate change, the government responded by arming Parliamentary guards with machine guns.

Refugee criminalization
    The Harper government is trying to criminalize those fleeing war crimes. It issued Operational Bulletin 202 to criminalize US Iraq War resisters, which the former chair of Canada’s Immigration and Refugee Board Peter Showler described as “fundamentally wrong-headed and a violation of the UN Refugee Convention”. The government claims war resisters interfere with other refugees, but last year Harper was silent over the genocide against tamils, and this year has tried to criminalize the resulting refugees. The Canadian Council for Refugees has responded by stressing that “people who are forced to flee for their lives need to be offered asylum and a warm welcome, not punished".

PRESCRIPTION FOR HEALTH
     Fortunately Canadians are rejecting this bad medicine: campaigning for Medicare and the redirection of military spending, organizing an aid boat to Gaza, exposing Harper’s prejudice concerning abortion and AIDS funding, demanding the repatriation of Omar Khadr and an end to security certificates, mobilizing to support the troops by bringing them home and taking care of their health, demanding sanctuary for war resisters, organizing to stop the tar sands, and opposing the criminalization of refugees. This is truly a prescription for health.
     As I share patient frustration trying to provide individual healthcare in an overcrowded ER, I’m comforted by all the work others are doing outside the hospital to protect and strengthen our collective health.

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.