Anthony V's blog

  
A Century after its Reporting, Mass Murder in Canada
is Still  Denied

On November 15, 1907, The Ottawa Citizen reported that over half the children in Indian Residential Schools across Canada were dying from uncontrolled disease (See the attached article). Yet one hundred years later, there has still been no official acknowledgement of this genocidal mortality, nor have the churches and persons responsible for these deaths been brought to justice.

The source of this report in the Citizen, Dr. Peter Bryce of Indian Affairs, claimed in a separate report that this consistently high death rate was caused by the deliberate spreading of disease in residential schools by staff members.

This Thursday, November 15, on the one hundredth anniversary of the publishing of residential school death rates in The Ottawa Citizen, we call on all citizens to protest the continued suppression of the truth of this crime against humanity by the government and churches responsible for it, and to force the truth from them.

We especially condemn the recent attempted concealment of residential school records by the United Church of Canada, and demand that this church, and the Catholics and Anglicans, be compelled by court orders to disclose and release the buried remains of all children who died under their care in Indian residential schools.

Until full disclosure is made, and those responsible for so many deaths are brought to justice, we call on all Canadians to actively boycott the government and churches of Canada by denying them all funding and allegiance, and to actively disrupt their operations.

We also issue a call to the world community to boycott all Canadian goods, trade and tourism, and to refuse to attend the 2010 Olympics.

We remember the Thousands of Disappeared Children.

Issued by The Elders,
The Truth Commission into Genocide in Canada
Chief Louis Daniels, Patron

keynewsschoolsandwhiteplague.gif www.hiddenfromhistory.org

 read more »

The General Strike is a national call to action, from citizens to other citizens. It is not about a single issue. It is not an anti-war protest, a civil rights protest, an election fraud protest. It is not about torture, surveillance, corporate media, the 9/11 coverup, or the environment. This strike is about all these issues and more.

A National Call to Action: Tuesday, September 11th, 2007
No school. No work. Buy nothing. Hit the streets.

http://www.strike911.org/

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid= 4157941601&pwstdfy=c2d130ac01f0ed47e22a7530bb4a9fa9

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Strike

 

 

I am concerned by Canadians’ deep perception of this country’s altruism. Numerous studies demonstrate that Canadians’ self-appraisal of their country’s foreign policy is the highest in the world. But do the facts fit our self-image?

It is well known that Canada participated militarily in the Boer War, First World War, Second World War, Korean War, first Gulf War, bombing of Serbia and the war in Afghanistan. What is less well known is that Canada did so without facing a serious threat of invasion and that none of these wars were morally justifiable. (WWII may have been justifiable after the fact, but Canadian motives for participating were not a high-minded struggle against anti-semitism or fascism. In a summer 1937 meeting with Hitler, Prime Minister McKenzie King lauded the Nazi’s support for the Fascists in Spain and during the war the Canadian government had a “none is too many” policy on immigration for fleeing European Jews.) Canada’s entry into the first three wars was more or less automatic because this country was part of the British Empire. We joined the last four conflicts because, quite frankly, Canada had become part of the U.S. Empire.   read more »

According to the CP, today marks 61 years since British authorities arrested more than 2,700 Jews in Palestine, in 1946, in a move to stamp out terrorism. Jewish resistance groups had been making strikes against the country's railways, blown up port patrol boats, and on June 17th, destroyed 10 of 11 bridges connecting Palestine with its neighbours. The British sweep failed to net major commanders or discover a significant amount of weaponry.

Today's AP ran a story telling us that Israeli PM Olmert says that Israel will not free the Palestinian women and children and thousands of other arbitrarily held Arab prisoners in return for captured IDF soldier Gilad Shalit. Interesting that we can all know his name, but so few of us could know the names of the many sitting in Israeli prisons. In a recorded message Shalit expressed disappointment in the "lack of interest" of the Israeli government in his fate.  read more »

CIA Declassifies the "Family Jewels" - An anonymous reader informs us that the CIA has recently declassified for your reading pleasure some records relating to illegal spying, assassination attempts, and other goodies. These are available from the CIA's FOIA portal. From the BBC article: " Last week, CIA chief Michael Hayden announced the decision to declassify the records, saying the documents were 'unflattering but part of CIA history.' The documents detail assassination plots, domestic spying, wiretapping, and kidnapping... Among the documents is a request in 1972 for someone 'who was accomplished at picking locks' who might be retiring or resigning from the agency."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.   [slashdot.org]  read more »

There is an orthodox view of what it means to be well educated, and the orthodox view is that a person is well educated who has gone through all the realms of education. And the higher up you go, the more degrees you have, the better educated you are. The more knowledge you have, the more facts you have acquired, the more languages you can speak, the more important people you can quote, the more reading you have done, all of that falls within the orthodox definition of higher education, of education itself, being well educated. And, of course, a lot of that is legitimate; that is, to me a lot of that makes sense.  read more »

The Lancet published  a new classification table of drugs drawn up by a group of leading British scientists and ranking heroin, cocaine, barbiturates and street methadone as the most harmful drugs, closely followed by alcohol in fifth place. Tobacco was assessed to be the ninth most dangerous drug. Cannabis was said to be the 11th most harmful, while LSD was ranked 14th and so-called "clubbers' drug" ecstasy in 18th. So, alcohol is nearly as harmful as heroin and tobacco is more dangerous than cannabis, LSD or ecstasy.

The classifications were based on individual drugs' so-called "harm scores" -- the physical damage to the user; how likely the drug was to induce dependency; and the effect of its use on families, communities and society.  read more »

This is at least partially in response to the idea that we are to be thankful for American benevolence and generosity. Here are 5 key ideas with quotations from Chomsky.

1)The US government and major transnational corporations basically run the world to maximize American profits.

" The 'principal architects' of the neo-liberal 'Washington consensus' are the masters of the private economy, mainly huge corporations that control much of the international economy and have the means to dominate policy formation as well as the structuring of thought and opinion. The United States has a special role in the system for obvious reasons".  read more »

David Suzuki gathering material for lobbying efforts - [The London Fog]

                               

The longest speaking trip in Mr. Suzuki's life is aimed at tapping into the groundswell of public interest in environmental issues. He will ask Canadians to tell him what they would do if they were prime minister. Suzuki said,"Whenever I travel across the country listening to Canadians, I am made aware that they are not obsessed with a 1-per-cent reduction in GST. The kind of issues that they raise to me have nothing to do with what politicians usually put their rhetoric around."  read more »

            

It does not take much insight to predict that the cauldron of animosities in the Middle East will continue to boil. As the industrial world shifted to an oil based economy and the incomparable petroleum resources of the Middle East were discovered, internal conflicts were exacerbated. Since WW2, control over such material wealth and strategic significance has been a priority for US policy.

The British had controlled the region by delegating authority to clients, with British force in the background. Local management was to be left to an "Arab facade" of weak compliant rulers, a device considered more cost effective than direct rule. When the population didn't passively submit, air power was available to control civilian populations. Winston Chuchill was in favour of using poison gas to subdue "recalcitrant Arabs"(mainly Kurds and Afghans).  Britian undermined attempts to restrict the use of air power against civilians.  read more »