(In spite of self-righteous posturing as a peaceful nation, the Canadian military-industrial complex helped develop and fuel nuclear weapons. Yves Engler, author of “Stand on Guard for Whom?” joins Paul Jay on theAnalysis.news. Please donate at https://theanalysis.news/donate/ – we can’t do this without you.)
TRANSCRIPT
Paul Jay
Hi, I’m Paul Jay. Welcome to theAnalysis.news. Please don’t forget, without your financial support, moral support, sharing, social media support, we can’t do this. I’ll be back in just a few seconds with Yves Engler, and we’re going to talk about the self-righteous Canadians.
Canadian governments like to portray themselves as the peacekeepers, the more reasonable country that tries to mitigate the excesses of American society and its military machine. Of course, Canada pitches in troops when necessary, but only when it seems like a just and legal war or so goes the self-serving and self-righteous narrative. Well, Yves Engler has written a new book that exposes the true North’s role in serving and making massive profits from the U.S. military-industrial complex. The book is titled Stand On Guard for Whom? A People’s History of the Canadian Military.
In the Canadian national anthem Oh, Canada, the phrase ‘we stand on guard for thee’ is repeated three times in four stanzas. Just who we stand on guard for is never made clear, but when the first version of the anthem was written in 1880, the main threat to stand on guard from was coming from the South. That said, a 1908 version made Canada’s military role clear at the time. Quote “At Britain’s side, whate’er betide. Unflinchingly we will stand. With hearts we sing, “God save the King.” Guide then one Empire wide, do we implore.”
Canadian elites and military have always found it profitable to support Empire. With the coming to power of Prime Minister Lester Pearson, Canada became a fullfledged junior partner of the American global hegemony. In fact, it was President [John F.] Kennedy that helped put Pearson in power in the first place in a flagrant manipulation of a Canadian election. More on that later.
None of what follows is meant to denigrate the courage and self-sacrifice of thousands of Canadians who served in the Canadian Armed Forces. My father was one of them, flying as a Navigator for the RCAF [Royal Canadian Air Force] from 1939 to 1945 in some of the most dangerous missions of the war. It was typical of the Canadian government in World War I and World War II to allow Canuck’s to be fodder in what amounted to suicidal missions and often pointless ones. My father consciously volunteered to join the Air Force in order to fight Hitlerite fascism, but he never had any illusions about Canada’s role in supporting fascism in the lead-up to the war. Including, as Yves writes in his book quote:
“Canada largely sided with the fascists during the Spanish Civil War. Ottawa refused repeated requests from Spain’s elected government to sell it weaponry. In April 1937, Ottawa passed the Foreign Enlistment Act in a bid to block Canadians from fighting on behalf of the Republican government.”
End quote. That is fighting against the dictator [Francisco] Franco, who was supported by [Adolf] Hitler and [Benito] Mussolini. My father’s brother volunteered and made it to Spain in spite of attempts by the Canadian government to obstruct the members of the Mac-pap [Mackenzie-Papineau] Battalion. Yves writes further down.
During this period, Canada found no fault in supplying war materials to the fascist Japanese army that occupied Korea and massacred the Chinese and Manchuria. In the years leading up to the start of the European front of World War II, Japan was the third-largest importer of Canadian nonferrous metals.
Every year on Remembrance Day, Canadian children are taught to recite a poem written by a Montreal doctor, John McCrae, in 1915 after thousands of Canadians were slaughtered in Yieppes, Belgium. The poem begins, “In Flanders Fields, the poppies blow.”. It ends with a call to arms.
“Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.”
I think it’d be better if kids were taught to read a piece by another Montreal doctor, Norman Bethune, who volunteered to go to Spain and China to fight against fascism. In 1939, he wrote:
“Are wars of aggression, wars for the conquest of colonies, then, just big business? Yes, it would seem so, however much the perpetrators of such national crimes seek to hide their true purpose under banners of high-sounding abstractions and ideals. They make war to capture markets by murder, raw materials by rape. They find it cheaper to steal than to exchange; easier to butcher than to buy.”
Bethune continues:
“Behind all stands that terrible, implacable God of Business and Blood, whose name is Profit. Money, like an insatiable Mulloch demanding its interest, its return, and will stop at nothing, not even murder of millions to satisfy its greed. Behind the army stands the militarists. Behind the militarist stands finance capital and the capitalist. Brothers in blood; companions in crime.”
Bethune ends with:
“Such an organization of human society as permits them to exist must be abolished. These men make the wounds.”
As much as Canadians like to think we’re better than that, the real history shows we’re not. Now joining us to discuss his new book, Stand On Guard For Whom? is Yves Engler. He’s a Montreal-based activist and author. He’s published 11 books, including House of Mirrors: Justin Trudeau’s Foreign Policy. Thanks for joining us, Yves.
Yves Engler
Thanks for having me.
Paul Jay
So, you traced quite a bit of history in the book. I’m going to kind of jump ahead and, in future interviews, pick up some of the other pieces of history. As people that watch theAnalysis know, I’m working with [Daniel] Ellsberg on a film about nuclear weapons. So, I jumped right to your chapter about Canada’s role in developing the apocalypse, apocalyptic weapons. So, start with the history of Canada and nuclear weapons. I guess it starts with uranium?
Yves Engler
Yeah. Canadian uranium was used in the U.S. nuclear weapons program, and ultimately the bombs dropped on Japan. In fact, in the late 1990s, the Dene people, who the uranium was taken from their land with little of their own control over. They actually apologized to the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki for the bombs being dropped. The Canadian government spent huge amounts of money researching nuclear weapons during World War II, coordinating with the British and the Americans. The British nuclear weapons program actually moved to Canada for safety reasons during World War II. Canadian officials were signatories to the Quebec Agreement between the U.S. and the British around nuclear weapons development, and Canadian officials were aware that the nuclear weapons were going to be dropped on Japan.
So, there’s a history of Canadian support for nuclear weapons. The Prime Minister, after Hiroshima and Nagasaki are bombed, says in his diary that he’s happy that this took place on the Asian races versus the European races, reflecting a certain kind of racism. I think that the Canadian involvement in nuclear weapons production and then Canadian military having nuclear weapons in future years is really kind of reflective of how Canada was very close to the British Empire and then, during World War II, became very close to the U.S. military. So, it’s sort of an outgrowth of Canada’s kind of unique history of close ties to the two great military empires of the past couple of hundred years.
Paul Jay
As the American economic investment, power, control of Canada grew—even before the First World War, a lot of the railroad expansion in Canada was actually American capital. Between the wars, Americans increased their position enormously. Off the top of my head, I believe, by the Second World War had overtaken British investment, but Prime Minister [John] Diefenbaker, who was in power in the late ’50s and early ’60s, he was still playing this sort of positioning of trying to play off the Americans and British, to some extent—having certain independence from the U.S., which pissed the hell out of Kennedy. It came to a head over a couple of issues, which directly connected with nuclear weapons. Tell us that story.
Yves Engler
Yeah, well, in the October 1962 blockade, Cuban Missile Crisis, the Diefenbaker government was unwilling to just accept the U.S. position. Most importantly, putting NORAD [North American Aerospace Defense Command] on high alert and that angered the U.S.. So basically, Diefenbaker and the foreign Minister were not happy to just go along with the U.S. position. In fact, Canadian naval vessels, without any political directive, did support the U.S. blockade of Cuba. The main thing that Kennedy wanted, which was the NORAD high alert and the full political subservience, they didn’t do. The head of the Canadian naval at the base in Halifax actually deployed Canadian naval vessels acting like they were part of a training mission, but they were just supporting the U.S. without having any piece of paper or any directive to do so. He basically broke the proper civilian-military command structure.
Paul Jay
Let me interrupt. There was a proper military-civilian command structure. Just the civilian command structure was in Washington, not Ottawa.
Yves Engler
No, exactly, and it’s actually totally surreal to read some military historians. Like Jack Granatstein points out, this is the worst breaking of the proper command structure in Canadian military history. Note, this is a very pro-military historian, but there’s actually a number of military historians that I quote in the book that actually act like this was a good thing that the naval commander just ignored the political directive and just followed the political directive from Washington versus what the people were supposed to be doing.
Paul Jay
Yeah. Let me add one other note. It’s Pierre Trudeau, the current Trudeau’s father. When he was Prime Minister, he got all the credit for Canada maintaining a sort of independent policy on relations with Cuba. But actually, it’s not true. It’s Diefenbaker that established that and defied the Americans, and maintained normal diplomatic and trade relations with Cuba. But go on with the story.
Yves Engler
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