FEATURES Donbas coal fuels local industry — as planned! The famed Sudbury Basin in Northern Ontario has been mined for about 100 years. Curiously enough, the well-known Don Basin, or Donbas, in the southeast Ukraine, has had producing mines for just over a century. They invite comparisons, not only for what they are, but more important, for what has been done with them in the past ten decades. The Sudbury Basin ore-bodies are rich, mineralized deposits that contain 14 elements. Chief of these are iron, sulphur, nickel, copper, platinum and gold. In the Donbas there is only one mineral — coal. When the Sudbury Basin deposits were first disco- vered, some industrial visionaries saw the area as the future industrial centre of Canada. That wasn’t an impossible dream. Something like 40 per cent of the ore was iron sulphide, which could have been the feed stock for an alloyed steel industry. Instead, that iron has largely gone to waste as an unwelcome by-product, with the Sudbury effort being to mine and refine the other 13 elements as raw materials and shipped to the world market to be made into finished goods. In short, Sudbury has, despite 100 years of develop- ment, remained a producer of raw materials, with a great deal of unrealized potential as an industrial centre. The only exception is a small coinage strip mill, from which coins are made by the Canadian Mint. It employs less than 100 workers. The direction of Sudbury develop- ment is largely the result of foreign control of the mining industry in the Sudbury Basin, mainly by U.S. corporate interests. The Donbas is a completely different story. Despite the enormous coal deposits, its future did not appear very bright in the beginning. Coal was mined by hand and was relatively expensive to be burned as a fuel. It had only a limited domestic market. In 1872, a Welsh capitalist, John Hughes, started a steel mill in Donetsk, the main town in the Donbas at the Jim Tester is a retired skilled worker living in Sudbury, Ontario. His last employer was Falconbridge Nickel, for whom he worked for 25 years. He is a former president of Local 598, Mine-Mill Union, and is well known in Sudbury as a labour journalist. : Recently, Tester spent two weeks in the Soviet Union. His main interest there was the diversified, industrial development of the famous mining centre of Donetsk, located in the fabul- ous Donbas area. This article is the first in a series about Donestsk, written especially for the Tribune. time. He reckoned the first-rate coking coal in the vast deposits of the Don Basin could be combined with the abundant iron ore just outside the Donbas. He was right. His intention was to supply steel rails for the developing Russian railroad system. He schemed better than he knew. His steel mill began the process of transforming a coal basin into what is today the foremost mining-indus- trial complex area in the world. There is a lot of idle chatter in our media about blue-collar workers being relics of the past. There isn’t the slightest indication of such a decline of skilled labor in the Donbas. In fact, the reverse seems to be the case, despite robots and automation. Coal and steel pro- duction in the Donbas are meeting planned increases. Educational levels are steadily rising. I believe the Donbas development is one of the best kept secrets of western propagandists. Just consider this: the Don Basin is a unique geological formation that runs westward from the Donets River and the Sea of Azov for a distance of 370 kilometres. Its greatest width is about 80 kilometres. It has about five million inhabi- tants, and a population density of 197 people per square kilometre, the highest in the Ukraine. The main city is Donetsk, with a population of over one million, and no unemployment. Coal mines and industrial establishments are scattered The author outside the Council of Trade Unions of the Ukraine in Kiev during his recent visit to the republic and the city of Donetsk. throughout the length and breadth of the whole Donbas area, in hundreds of hamlets, villages and towns. When Hughes started to smelt steel, he needed coke. With the making of coke, he started the process of the chemical distillation of coal. The Russian revolution guaranteed that process would be continued. Among the economic planning efforts, at the very beginning of Soviet power, was for a highly developed chemical industry from coal, and a machine-building capability to supply the mining industry of the Soviet Union. They may have been short on managerial ability in the begin- ning, but they proved to be very long-sighted in strategic planning. Today, Donetsk is a key industrial community in the Soviet Union. Some 22 coal mines and 150 big industrial enterprises operate within its city limits. Donetsk is also a major research and development centre. Its machine- building shops produce mining machinery, steel making equipment and chemical plants are among the most advanced in the world. That’s diversification —as planned! Falsifying facts for insidious purposes One of the strangest and most insidious groups on the political scene today is an organization that calls itself the Canadian Coalition for Peace Through Strength (CCPTS). This crowd advertize themselves as a ‘‘peace group’’, and attempt to gain access to schools and the media on that basis. They are, in fact, stridently opposed to the peace movement — which they denounce as ‘““KGB dupes’. They are ardent supporters of the Reagan administration’s military policies, and their Organization is closely tied-in with the burgeoning U.S. New Right, in particular the New York-based ‘‘Commit- tee for the Free World’’. Some time ago, I had the opportunity to debate on _ Cable TV with the chairman of CCPTS, a Polish emigré named Mirek Matuszewski. He confronted me with a Series of bizarre arguments, which I have since dis- covered are being widely disseminated by this organiza- tion, and others, in the school-system and in the press. The basic arguments of the Peace Through Strength group can be synopsized as follows: 1) They claim that ‘‘history’’ proves that only strong military preparations can prevent war. The 40 years of Peace’ that we have enjoyed since W.W. II, they say, has been made possible, only by the nuclear might of the free world’. The greatest threat to peace, they con- Clude, is the peace movement which wants to disarm and leave us helpless in the face of the ‘‘Soviet threat’’. 2) As evidence they cite W.W. II, which they claim — lieve it or not! — was caused by the peace movement. ft-wing ‘‘pacifism’”’ during the 1930’s, they say, and Unilateral disarmament in the West enabled Nazi Ger- Many to re-arm and launch the war ‘‘unopposed’’. 3) Finally, the only way to put an end to the nuclear danger of today, say the peace-through-strengthers, is to ‘make nuclear weapons obsolete’’ by building Ronald. €agan’s Star Wars defence network. Those who op- Pose Star Wars, they say, are like those people who Stood by and criticized nearly every great idea in history: after all, they laughed at the Wright Brothers, and they pughed at the idea of sending a man to the Moon, didn’t ey) These assertions comprise the basic polemical arsenal of Peace Through Strength. They are not only ahistorical and fraudulent, they display a breathtaking ignorance of Some of the simplest facts of our recent past. © One of the most self-evident truths of our age is that ‘Military deterrence by itself has never prevented war. € ascending scale of warfare in this terrible century is 4 lesson that should hardly need to be spelled-out. We News Analysis Fred Weir know, for instance, that theories of ‘‘deterrence’’ were very much in vogue in the pre-1914 world, but neither they nor the advent of frightening new industrial weapons — machine guns, poison gas, airships, etc. — prevented World War One. Twenty million people died. The Maginot Line — that great, often forgotten monument to peace-through-strength thinking — and the awesome superiority of the British Navy did not prevent World War Two. Fifty million perished. There has been no shortage of armaments and theories of military deterrence in our war-torn century. What has been missing is the political determination and the dip- lomatic will to put an end to war itself. We live today in an age that bears many striking similarities to those earlier ‘‘pre-war’’ periods. To ignore the unmistakable evidence of the past and to claim, as the peace-through-strength crowd does, that we actually owe our continued survival to the build-up of nuclear weapons is reminiscent of a joke that construction work- ers like to tell: A worker falls off the tenth floor of a building. As he is falling past the second floor he sees a buddy standing there, so he waves and shouts, ‘‘Every- thing’s okay so far!”’ e The charge that the European left and peace move- ments were responsible for ‘‘causing’’ the Second World War is a scandalous abuse of history. The peace move- ment during the 1930’s, and the USSR, put forward the concept of ‘‘Collective Security’’, which was to be an alliance between the Soviet Union and the democratic capitalist states to contain the aggressive fascist states. If such an alliance had been effected, World War Two might very well have been avoided (in the end, after much tragedy, the West had to ally with the USSR in order to defeat fascism). However, the call of the peace movement for a Collec- tive Security arrangement with the USSR was ignored. It was the right-wing — the peace-through-strengthers of the day — who refused any form of deal with the Soviet Union, and who gave the green-light to fascist aggres- sion: in Ethiopia in 1935, Spain 1936, Austria 1938, and finally the colossal sell-out at Munich, where the conser- vative leaders of Britain and France made their separate peace with Hitler. The record shows clearly that the peace movement opposed the right-wing policy of appeasing fascism at the expense of the USSR, and that the leaders of the peace movement rejected the Munich Agreement for what it was: a Callous betrayal of the Western peoples’ genuine hopes for peace. The record also shows that it was the left-wing and the “‘pacifists’’ of the world who were the first to take up arms against fascism: it was they who organized the International Brigades to aid Republican Spain against a Franco-Hitler-Mussolini invasion in 1936. e The idea that Star Wars can ‘‘make nuclear weapons obsolete’ is the most pathetic delusion of our age. The forty-year history of the arms race is studded with technological initiatives that U.S. leaders sold to the public with the false claim that they would contribute to “‘peace’’. It is true, as peace-through-strengthers say, that short-sighted critics in the past often laughed at great scientific ideas, but it is fraudulent nonsense to suggest, as they do, that there is any comparison between Star Wars and such scientific endeavors as the Apollo Pro- gram that landed men on the Moon. Like most scientific efforts in history, Apollo was an example of human ingenuity pitted against Nature. ‘‘The Moon,”’ as Carl Sagan has noted, ‘‘didn’t fight back’’. When the Apollo astronauts tried to land on it, the Moon didn’t take evasive action. ee The Soviets will fight back. History has adequately shown that when their country is threatened, Soviet scientists and engineers will be just as brilliant, innova- tive and resilient as their German, or American adver- saries. The arms race is a story of American ingenuity con- tinuously directed not against Nature, but against Soviet ingenuity. And that is a formula for endless conflict, or ultimate catastrophe. In Toronto recently, the neo-fascist Ernst Zundel was tried and convicted for spreading hatred and willful lies about history, for his assertion that the Holocaust never happened. Unfortunately, the Cold War Establishment in this country would never dream of taking action against the zealots of the Coalition for Peace Through Strength for their equally vast distortions of history, and their promotion of a war psychosis that could lead us into the final holocaust. < PACIFIC TRIBUNE, APRIL 15, 1985 e 5 :.