Stop the Project of Smears and Censorship Targeting Anti-War Conferences on Canadian University Campuses!
By James CLAYTON
Are you a student at a Canadian university? Help beat the efforts to censor anti-war actions on university schools by contacting the International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) and joining its struggle to develop a global anti-war movement led by the working class. Email iyssecanada@gmail.com and registertoday for the IYSSE’s online conference this Saturday at 1pm Eastern time–“The war in Ukraine and how to stop it: an online discussion of socialist anti-war strategy.”
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Canada’s state-owned nationwide broadcaster is trumpeting a foul right-wing smear campaign focused on silencing any voices important of the US-NATO instigated war with Russia over Ukraine– a war in which Canadian imperialism is playing an extremely belligerent and provocative function.
The witch-hunt is being led by the Ukrainian Canadian Congress (UCC). The UCC has substantial ties returning years with the Canadian state and, with Ottawa’s help, suppressed the function that Ukrainian nationalists played as Nazi collaborators throughout The second world war. It has actually long promoted a far-right, virulently anti-communist and anti-Russian kind of Ukrainian nationalism.
The CBC project was started with a Feb. 3 report “Anti-Ukrainian vandalism, harassment increasing at Canadian Universities,” which supplied no evidence whatsoever to justify its lurid heading. Based upon declarations from the far-right UCC, the post depicted any opponents of the US-led imperialist war versus Russia as violent pro-Russian racists.
UCC senior policy consultant Orest Zakydalsky declared that Ukrainians “have actually seen increasing physical attacks and violence,” without corroborating a single violent occurrence. The UCC called on the Canadian government to develop a McCarthyite “task force” to investigate these attacks– that is to smear, intimidate and silence anyone who exposes the predatory war goals of Canadian imperialism and its NATO allies or the fascist politics of their Ukrainian nationalist proxies.
If the UCC feels so emboldened as to demand state censorship of anti-war voices on university campuses this is due above all to its decades-long intimate ties to the Canadian state. Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland, the granddaughter of a Ukrainian fascist and Nazi collaborator, has enjoyed close ties with the UCC because youth. She embodies the alliance between Ukrainian reactionary nationalism and Canadian imperialism. Taras Zalusky, who was CEO and executive director of the UCC from 2010 till 2016, was recently selected as Defence Minister Anita Anand’s chief of staff at the effort of the Prime Minister’s Office.
The UCC seized upon a January 26 conference arranged by the Ottawa Peace Council at Ottawa’s Carleton University to start its campaign to smear and censor anti-war actions and agitation. Entitled “The War in Ukraine: What is the Path to Peace?”, the occasion featured activist and popular independent journalist Yves Engler and previous Green Party management prospect and self-avowed “eco-socialist” Dimitri Lascaris. The conference’s individuals made certain proper criticisms of the provocative function of the Western powers in instigating the war, however ended up with a worthless appeal to the Canadian government to reevaluate its assistance for the war against Russia and broker peace talks.
In a different incident at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, the Ukrainian Students Society succeeded in setting off a university examination into the Young Communist League, after the youth movement of the Stalinist Communist Celebration slammed a banner bearing the fascist motto “Slava ukraini!” This slogan was promoted by Stepan Bandera’s Company of Ukrainian Nationalists, which collaborated with the Nazis throughout World War II and bore duty for the slaughter of numerous countless Jews and Poles. The university specified of the YCL’s criticism, “This behaviour is not– and will not be– tolerated …”
The UCC encouraged its Ukrainian Trainees affiliate at Carleton to try to stop the Jan. 26 meeting ever taking place. Interesting Campus Security and the “Department of Equity and Inclusive Communities,” Ukrainian Students members grumbled that the suitable kinds had actually not been submitted. They likewise brazenly smeared Engler, making the unreasonable but deeply sinister accusation that he “might start harassment or violence towards trainees at the event.” Campus Security “guaranteed us that constables would be positioned at the doors … to guarantee the event was stopped prior to it began,” the student club later declared. Nevertheless, Carleton University administration, citing the importance of complimentary speech, intervened and the meeting went on.
After the conference, the UCC students intentionally misrepresented whatever the speakers really stated. The trainee club implicated the panelists of “promoting hate” and functioning as “a mouthpiece for Russian propaganda.” The CBC uncritically parroted these allegations, which were distributed in an open letter on Facebook.
The group accused the Peace Alliance of spreading “Russian propaganda and disinformation,” including with no evidence whatsoever that they “seem funded by Russian interests.”
The letter accuses Engler of “promoting disinformation” merely since of his previous looks on RT, the Kremlin-sponsored broadcaster which was prohibited by the CRTC at the war’s beginning. Ukrainian Students stopped working to cite a single declaration by Engler.
Even more, the group tried to connect the speakers’ appeal for peace talks with assistance for the Russian state and violent “hate” of Ukrainians. It published 2 pictures of unrefined pro-Russia graffiti, with the words “Rossiya” and the capital letter “Z” scrawled in pen on a wall, implying that this was the work of anti-war organizers.
There is definitely no proof connecting this graffiti to any individuals in the meeting, let alone its organizers. The worthless doodles are even more most likely to be a justification by the right-wing UCC members themselves. Ottawa Cops investigated their accusations and found no evidence to support them.
Declaring that the speakers had “urged genocide versus the Ukrainian people”– another filthy lie– the group continued that the “absence of security within the room and the parking area following the occasion led to students feeling extremely risky in vocalizing their viewpoints and in walking home.”
World Socialist Web Site reporters attended the January 26 event online. The only “intimidation and harassment” during the meeting came from Ukrainian nationalist students, who tried to shout down the speakers.
Engler provided a factual account of NATO’s eastward expansion towards Russia’s borders following the Stalinist bureaucracy’s dissolution of the Soviet Union, and Washington and Ottawa’s use of fascist forces to spearhead the 2014 Maidan coup that overthrew the country’s elected pro-Russian president. Lascaris, for his part, mentioned his family’s experience on the divided island of Cyprus to denounce the role of American imperialism in the region. Engler’s primary appeal was for the Canadian gentility to reevaluate its policy: “If you take a look at the context, in which Canada has actually been an active participant in intervening in Ukrainian affairs … this is very important to end this war and push for negotiations.”
This political disorientation streams from the politics of the Canadian Peace Alliance, in which leaders of the Stalinist Communist Celebration (CPC) of Canada have for decades rubbed shoulders with Christian and other pacifists. The January 26 meeting was chaired by Miguel Figueroa, who headed the Stalinist CPC for over two decades. Its point of view of pressuring the gentility is a rehash of the Stalinists’ Cold War-era campaign for “tranquil co-existence” between the USSR and imperialism and for Canadian commercialism to adopt a so-called “independent diplomacy.” As they dissolved the Soviet Union and changed themselves into a brand-new capitalist class, leading Stalinist bureaucrats pictured they might reintegrate Russia peacefully into the imperialist-dominated world economy on the basis of brought back capitalist social relations. The imperialists’ systematic encirclement of Russia and instigation of the current war and Putin’s reactionary response– based upon war and Excellent Russian chauvinism– underscored how disastrously misguided they were.
The truth that the CBC is promoting calls for censoring such shy propositions for peace talks as those advanced at the January 26 meeting shows how horrified Canada’s judgment elite is of the prospective development of a mass anti-war movement in the working class. They recognize millions of employees across the country are struggling to make ends meet as prices escalate, and civil services and wages are cut to the bone to money the billions of dollars required to wage war on Russia. They correctly fear that open political discussion of the war’s origins, as well as the bloody records of Canada and the other imperialist powers and their far-right Ukrainian proxies, will motivate students and youths to take up a struggle against the war and the capitalist profit system that has generated it.
From October 18, 1949 Winnipeg Free Press, page 1. Two articles report how hundreds of Ukrainian Nazi partners assaulted a public meeting at Winnipeg’s Ukrainian Labour Temple with damaged glass, rocks and iron bars, while the police waited. [Image: Winnipeg Free Press archive.]
The Liberal federal government has actually given no sign whether it will take up the UCC’s proposition for a “task force” to veterinarian and censor events on campuses. However the Canadian state has a long history of collaborating with reactionary Ukrainian nationalists to target left-wing opposition in the working class. As the WSWS exposed in the series “Canadian imperialism’s fascist friends,”the UCC was itself created by the Canadian government in 1941 in order to support Canadian imperialism’s goals in The second world war. After the war, the Canadian state utilized newly-arrived fascist partners from the Waffen SS Galizien Department, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and Bandera’s Ukrainian Insurgent Army as instruments of its Cold War foreign and domestic policies. Backed by the Canadian state, these far-right forces were utilized to violently break up employees’ conferences and picket lines, and move the politics of the Ukrainian diaspora, hitherto largely related to socialism, far to the right.
The UCC today is led by the political and familial descendants of those fascist partners. The Carleton Ukrainian club is associated to SUSK or Cоюз Українськoгo Студентства Канади, the Ukrainian Canadian Trainees Union established in 1953 as a political training camp for UCC trainee activists. Their filthy smear campaign against the Canadian Peace Alliance stands firmly in the UCC’s custom. All trainees and employees need to require an immediate halt to such intimidation and protect the right of trainees and young people to arrange public occasions in opposition to the Ukraine war and imperialism without fear of retaliation or political smear campaigns.
The growing political influence of the UCC within the Canadian state develops from the confluence of its fascist politics with the imperialist war against Russia, which is the judgment elite’s effort to “deal with” the escalating crisis of world commercialism through military conquest. NATO’s war in Ukraine, as the ever-escalating project painting China as an impending hazard underlines, is simply the opening shot in a Third World War for the imperialist redivision of the world.
The exact same objective conditions driving the ruling elite to war are moving countless workers around the world into resist it. The International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) fights to arm youths with the socialist and internationalist point of view that is essential to construct a mass anti-war motion in the working class to put a stop to the imperialist war.
In a statement ahead of a global anti-war rally held December 10, 2022, the IYSSE wrote: “Simply as it was the Russian Revolution, the greatest intervention of the working class in world history, that brought an end to the very first international carnage of World War I, it will be the intervention of the international working class that will today stop the escalation toward World War III.”