JOHN MORGAN ON RECEIVING LENIN PEACE PRIZE ‘For the survival of life itself’ TORONTO —:The chairman and secretary of the International Lenin Peace Prize Committee were in Canada last week to honor a leading Canadian peace activist. Dr. Nikolai Blokhin, chairman of the committee, ac- companied by its secretary, S.A. Akemov, presented the medal and diploma of the Lenin Prize to Dr. John Hanly Morgan, president of the Canadian Peace Congress, for his work in the *‘strengthening of peace among nations’’. Dr. Morgan, who has headed the Peace Congress since 1972 and is amember of the presidium of the World Peace Council, was for 35 years a Unitarian minister, and is at present Minister Emeritus of Toronto’s First Unitarian Congregation. Among the 200 guests express- ing pleasure at his selection for the prize were many associates from both his peace and church work. In accepting the Lenin Prize, Morgan pledged his “continued full efforts in this the great work of our time:. securing the future of our children in a world free of nuclear war.”’ The Lenin Prize was instituted more than 30 years ago. Since then, explained Blokhin, ‘‘outstanding state, polit- ical and public figures, representatives of national libera- tion movements, prominent scholars, and religious per- sonalities from many countries of the world have be- come its laureates.” Among them, he pointed out, were: Frederick Joliot- Curie and John Bernal, Salvador Allende and Paul Robe- son, Pablo Neruda and Pablo Picasso, Oskar Numez and Linus Pauling. ‘‘We are pleased to see now in their ranks, the dis- tinguished representative of Canada, Dr. John Morgan,”’ Blokhin said. He called attention as well to Morgan’s international prestige. At one point Blokhin spoke in his capacity as a physi- cian and stated that in a nuclear war, one-third of the world’s population would die from direct attack alone. Today, he said, “‘there is nothing more important than to prevent a thermo-nuclear catastrophe,” and to ac- complish that global task ‘‘it is necessary for the broad masses of people to realize the scope and nature of the military threat, to have a clear understanding of where it comes from, and of the ways and means of its elimina- tion.”’ He called attention to the program put forward by the Soviet Union for avoiding nuclear war, achieving disarmament, and maintaining and deepening detente. Dr. Blokhin, who had spoken through a translator, addressed the gathering in English at the particular mo- ment when he presented to John Morgan the special Lenin Peace Prize diploma, and pinned on him the accompanying gold medal. He also used the opportunity to congratulate Jeannette Morgan, chairperson of this glad occasion, and a member of the Peace Congress executive, and to greet a representation of the Morgans’ children and grandchildren who were present. In his response, Morgan called ‘‘the survival of life itself, not only human life but the very life of mother earth,”’ the ‘‘great issue of our age.”’ ‘The threat,’ he said, ‘‘comes .. . from a tiny fraction of earth’s human population that has step by step armed itself with weapons of apocalyptic destructive power and has announced the property of their use as a possible first-strike option in war.’ He went on: ‘‘Why we have come to this pass and where responsibility primarily lies is no longer subject to * serious debate. It is not a matter of conflicting opinions over informa- tion too limited to permit objective consensus and there- fore a subject upon which men and women of equal intelligence and goodwill may fairly differ: the evidence is overwhelming that the arms race has been fired up at each stage from within the industrial, financial, and mili- tary complex of the United States. All objective research people working on the peace questions accept this as obvious fact.”’ He noted the proliferation of peace activity and or- ganization and the demand in the USA for a nuclear freeze and rollback; in Canada for the country to become a nuclear weapons-free zone. ‘‘There are times in history recognizable as moments of irrevocable decision, moments of which historians can say: ‘Up to this point, there could have been a different decision; after that, other options were no longer open.’ Such was the situation in Europe when through unity of democratic forces fascism could have been stopped in the 1930s. We live now at another mo- chairman of the International Lenin Peace Prize Cort! mittee. ment of such decision; the weeks and months ahead will be historic for those who live in Europe, in the United States, in Canada, and indeed, in all the world.” __ Morgan said he was honored to receive the Leni Peace Prize, * “coming as it does from a people who by immeasurable pain and sacrifice turned back the fascis! onslaught and gave us all a second chance, a people and4 leadership that I know as a fact of history have throug! subsequent years made herculean efforts to stop thé terrible armaments upward spiral.”’ The man’ who would carry this expression to hi committee, Dr. Blokhin, has valid credentials himsel for his concern for peace and human life, as pointed ou!) by Jean Vautour, former organizational director of thé) Canadian Peace Congress, who introduced him. Since 1975, general director of the Oncologicd Centre, USSR Academy of Medical Sciences, and past president of the International Union agains! Cancer, he served in a military hospital during Wor! War II. He is president of the USSR-USA Society, a! elected member of the Supreme Soviet, and is active ! the Soviet peace movement. At the close of the Toronto event Blokhin joined hands with a group of children who linked up to thé entire audience, as John Morgan noted a new ane beautiful world-wide symbol, the joining of hands. 4 spontaneous chorus of We Shall Overcome, « begul from the audience, was followed by these closing words of John Morgan which he called a benediction: “‘. . . lé us gather all our courage, all our confidence and valo! that we the people shall prevail, nation by nation, lan by land, and that the world of peace awaited be at last # world of peace attained.”’ International Focus Tom Morris Unions in Afghanistan Abdul Satter Purdeli, chair- man of Afghanistan’s trade union central writes about some major gains made in that country since the national democratic revolution in 1979: Trade unions were banned until 1978, he writes. In five years union membership now totals 160,000; public sector wages rose 26 per cent and low wage rates jumped by 40-50 per cent. Workers’ housing is being built, cooperative shops estab- lished and, for~the first time medical centres and hospitals with free care built. The same applies to kindergartens and : nursery schools. Prior to the revolution there were no labor laws. The work day averaged 14 hours. Today labor laws exist protecting all aspects of employees’ work lives. An eight-hour day is es- tablished. “Afghan trade unions em- phasize the cultural and recrea- tion needs of workers’ lives,”’ ~ Purdeli writes. And, in a touch of class, he reports the first workers’ - vacation/rest home was recently opened “‘in the most beautiful surroundings. “It is housed in the palace of the former Royal Family’’. Films are shown, concerts put on; workers can join amateur performing groups. He describes the role of unions in the massive literacy campaign in which 1.5 million adults learned to read and write and reports that tens of thousands of workers achieved literacy without missing work. And, given Afghanistan real- ity, Purdeli reports that thousands of Afghan unionists have joined the nation’s self- defence units to protect their factories, homes and gains from terrorists. Viewing the achievements in five short years, Afghanistan’s working people have much to defend. — Over 1.5 million Afghanistan workers learned to read and write in - the last four years in a country-wide literacy campaign. PACIFIC TRIBUNE—JUNE 17, 1983—Page 10 . ‘legitimate government’ what we have now in Saigon is — The tragedy of the United States “Our commitment was.to a and neither ‘legitimate’ nor a ‘government’ ... Our promise was to help South Vietnam, not to destroy it.” So wrote James Reston in the New York Times in 1966 as the United States was being drawn inexorably into what became a 10-year war. Before it ended hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese, Kampucheans and Laotians died. Over 59,000 U.S. soldiers were killed, another 155,000 were wound- ed. This terrible toll happened under the same catchwords as we're hearing today out of Washington ‘containing communist subversion’’, “‘defending democracy’’. The names on the map are dif- ferent, the rationale the same. Lieut. Commander Albert Schaufelberger died May 25, 1983, the first U.S. military personnel claimed by El Sal- vador the war Reagan wants. His obituary could have been written back in 1966 when U.S. journalist Sydney Lens wrote . about Vietnam: “The tragedy of Britain in 1776 was that it linked itself with counter-revolution. The tragedy of the United States 19] years later is that it hasn’t learned from its own history and is again aligned with counter-revolution.”’ And again in 1983. Michael Krawcywk, a jobless, disabled Vietnam war veteran, sits beside a sign he placed on his front lawn. He wanted people to “remember” the first U.S. serviceman to die in El Salvador.