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	Spartacist Canada No. 148	Spring 2006

Afghanistan, Haiti: All Canadian Troops, Cops Out Now!

MAWO Honours Imperialist Top Cop

(Young Spartacus Pages)

VANCOUVER—For the last two years Vancouver’s Mobilization Against War and Occupation (MAWO) has postured as an alternative to the flagrantly Canadian nationalist StopWar.ca coalition. We always said this was a fraud, and their recent antics have really driven this home. On 26 November 2005, MAWO issued a statement calling for “TWO Emergency Picket Lines” to protest, not imperialist brutality in Afghanistan, but the “tragic death” of one Canadian soldier there. The headline of their press release read: “Protest the death of Canadian Soldier Braun Scott Woodfield” and added, “B.C. mourns Canadian Soldier Killed in Afghanistan.”

A month later, MAWO met the killing in Haiti of “retired” RCMP officer Mark Bourque with still greater lamentations. Bourque was a member of the “special elections team” of 25 Canadian ex-cops, an adjunct to the 125-strong RCMP force that is part of the brutal racist United Nations occupation there. Yet, equating the enforcers of imperialist depredation with their victims, MAWO bemoaned his death as “another senseless and tragic loss on top of the thousands of Haitian lives that have already been lost through the occupation of Haiti” (20 December 2005 press release). Incredibly, MAWO even called to “honour the life of Mark Bourque” who, as head of security at the 2002 G-8 meeting of imperialist leaders in Kananaskis, Alberta, led the largest peacetime security operation in Canadian history against leftist protesters.

MAWO’s obscene salute to this ex-RCMP officer and their sympathy for the imperialist forces whose crushing occupation has cost untold thousands of Afghan lives are the antithesis of anti-imperialism. At bottom, this demonstrates MAWO’s reformism and ultimate loyalty to this country’s racist ruling class. Equating oppressed and oppressor is part and parcel of MAWO’s conception that everyone can become part of their “movement against occupation.” Likewise, their call to “Bring the Troops Home Now” is a social-patriotic demand meant to engender in opponents of the Afghanistan occupation a false sense of common interest with the imperialist armed forces, while concealing their murderous role.

As revolutionary internationalists, the Spartacus Youth Clubs welcome blows suffered by our “own” ruling class in its neocolonial adventures. Such setbacks to the imperialists coincide with the interests of the working class and all the oppressed. The armed forces are the instrument of imperialist occupation and conquest, and the enforcers of the capitalist system of exploitation. Along with the police and prison guards, they constitute, in the words of Russian Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin, “the armed bodies of men” that defend private property and capitalist class rule. They are the core of the capitalist state, breaking strikes, enforcing the national subjugation of Quebec, persecuting Natives and spying on immigrants and leftists. They cannot serve the interests of the working class or oppressed anywhere. The SYC stands for the working class smashing the capitalist state through socialist revolution, the only way to end imperialist war once and for all.

In both Afghanistan and Haiti, Canadian military interventions serve to uphold the predatory interests of their senior partners in Washington. In the last year, the Canadian imperialists have adopted a more flagrantly bellicose posture in Afghanistan, where the Canadian forces are propping up the warlord-infested U.S. puppet government. Canada’s generals speak openly of bloody offensive actions in the Kandahar region, where 2,200 fresh troops are arriving as Canada prepares to assume command of the NATO brigade headquarters. In Haiti, Canada joined the U.S. and France in ousting the president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, in 2004, and its cops are part of the UN’s ongoing occupation force. Whenever the Canadian imperialists intervene abroad, including when this is cloaked as “peacekeeping,” they do so to uphold neocolonial oppression. Canadian troops, cops: out of Afghanistan and Haiti now!

In our interventions at antiwar protests and forums, the SYC has fought tooth and nail against the pernicious myth that the Canadian rulers are more benevolent and peace-loving than their U.S. counterparts. From the start of the military buildup against first Afghanistan and later Iraq, we said these were wars of imperialist aggression on the part of the U.S. and its allies. We called to defend these desperately poor neocolonial countries against imperialism while giving absolutely no political support to the Afghan Taliban fanatics or Iraq’s bloody dictator Saddam Hussein.

Today, insofar as the disparate Iraqi “resistance” forces target the imperialists and their lackeys, we call for their military defense against the imperialist occupiers. At the same time, we oppose the murderous communal violence against ethnic, religious and national populations, often carried out by the same forces fighting the occupation. We take a parallel stance in Afghanistan with regard to the woman-hating Taliban and Al-Qaeda fanatics, remnants of the U.S.’s cutthroat mujahedin allies against the former Soviet Union’s wholly progressive intervention in the 1980s. Throughout, we have emphasized that the key way to deal blows to the imperialist onslaught is through class struggle here at home—the independent mobilization of workers against their “own” capitalist exploiters.

Canadian Nationalists in Third World Garb

For all its talk about solidarity with struggles of “Third World” peoples, Fire This Time (FTT—MAWO’s parent group) did not side with Iraq while the bombs were falling on Baghdad, i.e., when it counted. Ensconced in StopWar.ca, the local antiwar coalition that embraced everyone from Liberal cabinet minister Stephen Owen to then mayor Larry Campbell, FTT promoted the dead-end politics of bourgeois pacifism. They even bragged, ludicrously, that the Vancouver peace crawls “effectively influenced imperialist politics” (Fire This Time, May 2003).

As soon as the bombs started dropping, the antiwar “movement” largely evaporated and the “respectable” bourgeois endorsers decamped. As war became occupation, FTT and then its front group MAWO began their uncritical and vicarious cheerleading of the “resistance” forces in Afghanistan and Iraq, hailing the reactionary Islamic fundamentalists and Ba’athist thugs as “anti-imperialist” fighters.

For FTT/MAWO there is no real contradiction between honouring both the agents of imperialist occupation and the forces sometimes resisting them. Behind their class-collaborationist pursuit of “building a broad and popular movement” against war and occupation is the view that a wing of the bourgeoisie in one country or another can unite with the oppressed in a genuine struggle against the perceived excesses of capitalist exploitation. Absent is any perspective of mobilizing workers in revolutionary struggle against their own rulers, here or anywhere else.

In days of yore MAWO raised cheap criticisms of the overt Canadian patriotism at antiwar rallies. Like the Toronto-based June 30 Coalition (J30—now Toronto Solidarity Project), MAWO claimed to be an alternative to the mainstream antiwar outfits. But without a revolutionary working-class program, they proceeded to peddle abject reformism with an activist face. MAWO promotes “Third World” nationalism punctuated by Canadian nationalist lunges. As for J30, by last spring they were putting out leaflets telling people to “Contact your MP and protest Canadian taxpayer subsidies of SNC Lavalin,” a major Canadian military producer. Hardly militant opposition to war profiteering, this was nothing but a liberal lobbying campaign to pressure the Canadian government.

Cut of the same political cloth is FTT/MAWO’s call for an “Independent Public Inquiry” into the Afghanistan occupation. They claim such an inquiry is the way to “build an effective anti-war movement in Canada against Canadian imperialism.” On the contrary, channeling anti-militarist sentiment into pleas for the government to essentially investigate itself can only serve to refurbish the image of the racist, capitalist state.

The Spartacus Youth Club challenged the nationalist politics of MAWO’s UBC affiliate, Coalition Against War on the People of Iraq (CAWOPI), at their January 26 meeting titled “Canada Out of Afghanistan.” Initially CAWOPI tried to cover their rotten politics by excluding us. When our comrades protested this attempt to bar communists, CAWOPI, exposed in front of their own supporters and student onlookers, backed down. The SYC then entered the meeting to intervene with a revolutionary, internationalist and proletarian understanding of how to fight imperialism.

In the discussion period, an SYC speaker indicted MAWO’s pleas to honour a Canadian cop in Haiti and protest the death of a Canadian soldier in Afghanistan. “That’s not anti-imperialism,” he said, “It’s in the interests of workers that the Canadian army gets delivered a defeat in Afghanistan, that the imperialist forces suffer defeats and setbacks in Iraq. That’s what taking a side with oppressed people means, and that’s manifestly not what MAWO does in practice.”

The CAWOPI supporter chairing the event then interrupted, not to defend the group’s politics, but to state that such criticism was impermissible. Following this show of political bankruptcy our comrade concluded:

“What’s necessary to end the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, and the innumerable occupations that will ensue unless capitalism is overthrown, is the mobilization of workers. We need a working-class revolutionary vanguard party that calls things by their right names, that draws a class line and says the Canadian cops, army and prison guards are the enemy. And this vanguard party can weld together the struggle for Quebec independence, full citizenship rights for all immigrants and self-determination for all nations, and have an anti-capitalist perspective that can actually deal a death blow to this wretched system of exploitation and create socialism in its place.”