And the walls came a tumbling’ down.
After a bit more rambling about openness and engagement, and inventing trade (really, it was invented?), Baird spoke again in metaphor, this time about walls: “You cannot develop understanding by building walls between cultures. You cannot achieve prosperity by erecting walls between economies and you cannot advance a people by putting walls between them and the state.”
Great metaphor and it raises some serious issues. Domestically, it raises issues about the Conservatives’ increased spending on prisons for its law and order agenda. It raises issues for the walls that are raised at international meetings when civil protestors are kept outside of a city center and then “kettled” and arrested for being in a “riot”. It raises issues about the indigenous people and the current and historical confinement to their reservations and their lack of democracy subservient to the outdated and colonial Indian Act of 1876. And if the metaphor is extended, the government itself has created walls of silence around its agenda (the economy, the climate, the military), and around its employees in the civil service. So much for “advancing” Canadians.
Internationally, walls are even a larger issue.
Israel (okay, I said I wouldn’t but here goes…)
Canada has become the western world’s most vocal supporter of the Israeli government. This is based on historical support for Zionism that goes back to our British imperial roots, and for the current Millennial Christian goals of an Israel that occupies all the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. The latter has been subsumed under the U.S./Israeli rhetoric and agenda for the war on terror and the ever increasing fear-mongering about security (more below).
But where is the wall here? Ah, it extends around the decreasing cantons/bantustans of the Israeli occupied West Bank, seriously eroding the water resources and agricultural land that could make the base for a truncated but independent Palestine. Of course, all these Palestinians are terrorists, and the Creator would not want us to deal with them, nor are we to make “calculated inputs” into the number of dunnams of land have been confiscated, expropriated, and built on by the Israeli settlers, nor on the number of deaths and extrajudicial killings and numbers of prisoners and children tortured in the Israeli jails in the occupied territories. Results are all that count—the dominance of Israel regardless of the humanitarian and international laws put forth under the aegis of the U.N.
Then there is the second wall, the barrier of razor wire, concrete and steel that surrounds the Gaza strip, and is extended non-metaphorically around the Mediterranean coast by the Israeli navy. With 1.5 million people behind this wall, without decent power and water, with minimal civic structure as all are controlled by Israel, the chances for “developing understanding” and “achieving prosperity” are pretty slim. PM Harper’s description of the well-known “calculated input” of the huge number of deaths under the Cast Lead attack is that it was a “proportional response” —yes, results, ignore those inputs.
While these walls are real, they essentially remain invisible to the greater western public. Guarded from discussion by the corporate controlled media, the Israeli wall that creates the cantons in the West Bank, and the strict controlled boundary that walls in the Gaza strip appears to not even have entered the speech writer’s mind … or he simply concluded that no one would be able to see the huge contradiction in the metaphor he or she created.
I will however leave Iran out of the arguments. Baird’s reflection of the Canadian government’s views are so wildly inflammatory and error prone and have been covered well elsewhere.
Security and prosperity (but no longer freedom and democracy)
For a while, most arguments made for global consumption conflated free markets with democracy and freedom. Economic statistics from around the world, if properly made into “calculated inputs” clearly show that this is not true. Now, the current rhetoric is about “security” being conflated with prosperity.
This simply raises the specter of a militarized corporate state that allows for certain personal freedoms, including perhaps my ability to rant at the Canadian government without a visit from CSIS as an expression of Canada being an open society with open markets and open-mindedness, none of which are fully true.
Baird’s essential argument, or at least that of his speechwriter, is that security is not in conflict with openness: “[There is] no fundamental conflict between national security and the open society….Both seek to protect the same values, the same rights and the same freedoms.”
Is that why perhaps we have “free trade” agreements written behind closed doors by corporate lawyers and CEOs in collusion with their government cronies? Is that why we had so much “openness” about the F-35s? Is that why we have security agreements with Israel (“an attack on Israel is an attack on Canada”—not in my book!)? And is that why there is a security perimeter around North America—with of course that wall between Mexico (and the rest of Latin America) and the U.S. and many walls between the people and the government such that corporations have more rights—by way of their power politically and financially—than the citizens do? Is that why the government shut down parliament twice, and was in contempt of it later?
My security does not require that I live in an increasingly militarized state. Part of our economic success—along with the tar sands—is Canada’s role in military spending. The creation of the F-35 has its Canadian corporate counterparts, with government assistance—building parts of the F-35 systems. Canada is one of the world’s leading arms exporters to countries around the world. Our valorous military is not needed to bomb Yugoslavia or Libya (or Syria or Iran) in order for me to feel secure, in fact, it makes me less secure, as does its sycophantic ranting behind the U.S. and Israel.
Back at the U.N.
The U.N. may be flawed, and yes it does need alterations and improvements, but certainly not as would be indicated by John Baird and Canada‘s Conservative government. Canada’s reputation has deservedly taken a turn for the worse at the U.N., and Harper, who would rather speak to an admiring crowd at the New York-based Appeal of Conscience Foundation, an interfaith (Jewish – Christian) council, has avoided the U.N. the past two years.
So world be warned. It is a good thing that Canada is not nearly as powerful or influential as its new bully attitude would want it to be as it is operating with “immutable goals” that are unaccountable to “calculated inputs” (which in my language means “facts or information”) and is not interested in the “processes and procedures” of democracy, human rights, and international law.
