An end to

tw only thing we have

silence!

to fear,” declared Franklin

Delano Roosevelt, “‘is fear itself.’”

That historic observation opens a wide door upon to- -
confronting humanity with a U.S. escalat-
already driven by desperation towards the

day’s dilemma,
ing war in Asia,

abyss of world nuclear disaster.

__. And the heads of “free west” governments, our own
included, fear to speak out against the U.S. perpetrators
of this threatening calamity. Why?

A few good reasons for this fear might be posed. The
U.S. of today under the Johnson regime, a good samaritan

or cunning pawnbroker? Its

“foreign aid”, given by the

hand of generosity, or the hand of Cain? Its “allies” whose
support — and silence, dignity and heritage of their own
people, traded for U.S. dollars.

Vietnam provides many, if not all, of the answers!

Perhaps the Wilsons, Pearsons, Martins et al of the
“free west” may not like to look upon the bodies of Viet-

namese women and children

roasted to a crisp by U.S.

napalm bombs, or a Viet peasant coughing out his lungs af-
ter a deadly spraying with U.S. poison gas; but they keep
silent because they fear what is for them a greater cala-

mity—the loss of U.S. dollars.

Perhaps also they don’t care to look upon the
“scorched earth” destruction of the crops and food of a
hungry and war-torn people, but their fear keeps them
silent. While the good earth of another people may be
scorched and blackened, their own must be kept well-

manured with Yankee dollars.

silence.

This is the greatest fear

Hence their fears and their

of today; the fear that too

often grips the United Nations, and too often in the past
turned it into an obedient pawn of U.S. war adventures
and aggression in the countries of Africa, Asia and Latin
America. A fear that keeps governments silent, déspite the
ever-growing protests of their own peoples against these

Pentagon crimes against humanity; crimes that already
equal if not surpass those of the Hitler era!

The winning of Peace poses an ultimate choice; to
_ abandon fear, break the silence, even forfeit the flow of
U.S. dollars, and speak out for an end to the monstrous

U.S. war crimes in Vietnam.
nuclear disaster?

ee <
SSESSSSSSS

Tom

McEWEN

ack in “Merrie England” in

the year 1215 the signing of’
“Maena Charta” took place, This
historic event, among other
things, was productive of many
illusions, some of which remain
with us today,

Without going into the social

- or class antagonisms which

brought the Great Charter into

being, two sterling principles

upon which our social and judicial

way-of-life are said to be based,
_ were set down:

One, that any citizen of the

_-_.realm, charged with an offense,

must be presumed to be innocent
of the charge until proven other-
wide before and by “a jury of his
peers,” that is, a jury of his
fellow citizens, And two, that no
citizen may be arrested, de-
tained, imprisoned or otherwise
molested or held without trial,

_ without due cause; and that such

“due cause” will be explicitly

and speedily set forth by the
proper legal authority,

_ Some 750 years later, prob-
ably just to make sure modern.

That, or U.S: dollars and

capitalist society hadn’t entirely
forgotten Magna Charta in its
pursuit of pillage, pelf and profit,
the United Nations re-empha-
sized these and other fine prin-
ciples as set down in 1215 in
another lengthy document,. en-
titled the “United Nations Declar-
ation of Human Rights,”

Canada of course, along with
many other nations, was asigna-
tory to that latter-day Declara-
tion, and, as with most of the
other “Free West” vintage,“ more
honoured in the breach than in
the observance,”

A-few centuries after Magna
Charta we had robbed, swindled,
starved and all but decimated
our Native Indian and Eskimo
people, We had also cut “a jury
of his peers” in half in order to
make sure that a great Canadian
patriot back in 1885.wouldn’t go

unhanged,
Later, in order to break the

Winnipeg General Strike of 19 195
we stood Magna Charta on its
head with Section 98 ofthe Crim=
inal Code, which reversed the

principle of the accused being .

im The Daily Worker, London

“And I blame the increased cost of living on the fact
that everything has become more expensive.”

The war on poverty

Ts remarkable “discoveries” were made last week by
two Liberal spokesmen junketting’ in B.C. Dr. R. A. J.
Phillips, the new Liberal general-in-command of Prime
Minister Pearson’s “war on poverty” has discovered that
one out of every four or more Canadians are living in con-
ditions of abject poverty; victims of disease, slums, mal-

nutrition and illiteracy. -

Then no sooner had Mr. Phillips unburdened himself
of the long-obvious division in our tinselled affluence than
along comes our new Liberal Minister of Agriculture, Mr.
John J. Greene from Ontario, to tell us of yet another long-
obvious truth: that the family farm, long the bedrock of
our agricultural and national economy, is facing social and
economic extinction. That scores of hundreds of our farm
people are trying to exist upon an annual cash return for
their labours, of some $1,500-dollars more or less. “Some-
thing has got to be done about it,”’ quoth the Minister, :

but he didn’t say what.

What he did say, however, coincided largely with
what war-on-poverty Mr. Phillips said; that a vast section
of Canada’s industrial and farm people live on or well be-
low the border-line of sub-standard poverty—completely
outside the privileged stockade of our much-boasted dyna-

mic affluence.

held innocent until proven other-
wise by a jury of his peers—and
put the onus of proving his inno-
cence upon the accused, In the
“Hungry Thirties” we dug up the
same Section 98 to guillotine the
Communist Party of Canada and
railroad hundreds of jobless and
hungry Canadians into prison,
because the former accused the
monopoly bellyrobbers of thena=
tion’s hunger, and the latter
couldn’t prove their own “inno-
cence” at being deprived of the
right to a job—and food,

Then in the mid-forties we
Canadians greased the Churchill
coldwar launching platform with
a hair-raising anti-Soviet “spy”
thriller, and had a “Star Cham-
ber” Royal Commission com-
pile a vast volume of prefabri-
cated “evidence” against numer-
ous citizens, not a line of which
would have stood up in any open
Canadian Court of law. In point
of fact our then “minister of jus-
tice” had to publicly admit as
much in Parliament, But Magna
Charta took a terrific beating in
the process,

Now, while we don’t boast of
it, we have another anti-Soviet
“spy” thriller on tap, Long“tried”
and already “convicted” in our
established organs of public mis-
information, the “accused” is
already a condemned man—to a
sentence worse than hanging,

The Tory mentality, like a

hungry mongrel on the scent of
a political garbage can for a
smelly morsel with which to bait
the government, compels another
Liberal “minister of justice” to
lamely protest a complete “lack
of evidence to bring the accused
to trial” with or without a jury
of his peers—but assures all and
sundry that the said ‘‘accused”
will be under constant surveil-
lance of our political police for
the rest of his lifetime!

To top this off another Liberal
minister has fired the “accused”
from his job as a minor civil
servant, cancelled all his vested
rights in the pension provisions
of his job, Thus we have two
Liberal ministers chanting in
unison, a requiem for Magna
Charta and the Declaration of
Human Rights, ending their dirge
upon an illusion-shattering note
—*the case is closed,”

Canada, $5.00 one year;

Ottawa, and for payment of postage in

At Zit (SX

Editor — TOM McEWEN
Associate Editor —
Circulation Manager — JERRY SHACK
Published weekly at”
Ford Bldg., Mezzanine No. 3, 193 E. Hastings St.
Phone 685-5288 :

Subscription Rates: :
$2.75 for six months. North and South America
and Commonwealth countries, $6.00 one
one year. Authorized as second class mail by the Post Office Deportment,

Worth |
Quoting

There is no danger that a cou
so powerful as the U.S. would
face by withdrawing itself from,
thereby liquidating, the war in Vi
nam. This thought Walter Lippman
pressed in his syndicated column
Tuesday, Jan. 4. Lippmann haste
to warn, however, that a countr'
powerful as ours ‘‘can lose face »
fooling around with it’. Lippmat
warned of the consequence that cou
follow from “fooling around” with
peace issue as a demagogic cover
some new military operation exteé
ing and intensifying the war.
(THE WORKER, New York, Jan. 9/:

*

The President is waging his ‘‘pe
offensive’’ with perfect sincerity. Hé
really does most earnestly desire ‘uf
conditional discussions’’, provided only
that before they start, all objecti
are waived to his tearing up the 19.
Geneva Agreements, which the U
are pledged to respect and to wh
this country is a party.

Provided, too, that the enemy e
is fighting, i.e., the South Vietnam
‘National Liberation Front, not only
surrenders unconditionally, but com=
mits suicide before the negotiations
start. a

(Konni Zilliacus in British
DAILY WORKER,
Jan. 8/66)

*

At bottom, Washington’s fear and
anger over TV coverage in Vietnam is
soundly based; if the American public
had access to the truth about the £
and how the U.S. is fighting it, the
Administration could find itself in
trouble. ; :

(NATIONAL GUARDIAN, Jan. 1/

Ladner Voice of Women (VOW)
On January 7, wired President
son appealing to him to “open
tiations directly with all parties in
Vietnam conflict or to put the initiat-
ing of negotiations before mutually
acceptable mediators". s

Espionage is a dirty business.
in any man’s language, not made
less so by the known fact in the
diplomatic embassies of most of
the world’s nations, at home and
abroad, it is a top priority job;
always well hidden behind a cur-
tain of “secrecy” and the moth-
eaten excuse of “national se- ©
curity,” =

Just the other nightonTV when |
questioned on the alleged “bug-
ging” of the Soviet Embassy in —
Ottawa, our Prime Minister de- 4
nied any knowledge whatever of —
such goings-on, “but,” said the
Great Man, “I could tell you —
something about ‘bugging’ the
Canadian Embassy in Moscow.”

While anindignant peopleswept
Section 98 from theStatute Books
of Canada nearly 35 years ago,
Ottawa still operates onaSection _
98 mentality, eee

TAMMIE tery
h
1

MAURICE RUSH

year. All other countries, $7.00;

cash,

_ January 14, 1966—PACIFIC TRIBUNE—Page 4