THE FIGHT FOR PEACE

Vietnam and Chile

By JIM LEECH

John Morgan, president of the
Canadian Peace Congress and
Unitarian minister, brought a
New dimension in the world-
Wide struggle for peace — an
Mspiring concept already em-
braced by a majority of the
World’s people—to the audience
in Toronto’s Bloor Collegiate
‘auditorium, Nov. 15.

It was a vision—not of peace,
but of how to fight for peace,
Not simply by stopping bombs,
but by stopping as well the
“subtle” annihilation of human
beings in widespread economic
and political warfare.

From Santiago, Chile, site of
the recent meeting of presidents
Of peace organizations in 70
Countries, Mr. Morgan delivered
a word picture of the devo-
tion of Asians, Africans and
Latin Americans to the cause
Of world peace.

Mr. Morgan spoke of Vietnam,
Peace priority number one, of
Canada, U.S. and Chile.

Economic Aggression

But the meeting’s banner, pro-
Claiming, New Ways to Peace,
forecast the main purport of the
€vening’s message. It hinted at
the tremendous endeavor in

Chile to prove a point for peace- ~

ful progress.

Vietnam is being attacked by an
aggressor, but “you don’t have to
drop bombs on people as in Viet-
Nam, to carry on aggression,”
Mr. Morgan charged, going on to
detail economic warfare as prac-
tised against countries like Chile.

‘If bombs were falling on
Chile, everybody would under-
Stand,” he said. “It would be a
threat to world peace — as in
Vietnam. There are other ways
Of fighting wars.

“The peace movement now is
a movement that is rooted in
the needs of human beings for
National development all around
the world, for if this national
development does not take
Place, people die.

“They may be tiny babies, but

they’re people; or they may be
kids — eight, nine, ten — oF
they may be people of the full
extent of years. But they die
because they don’t have what it

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takes to stay alive and build a
viable culture, because they do
not control their own civiliza-
tion.”

Effect on Canada

Canada could learn from them
too, Mr. Morgan asserted.

“Are we that far removed
from Chile, from Iraq, from any
place in the world where out-
siders decide fundamentally
what happens to our culture? In
the long run, as these other
countries assert themselves in
the world, and say who they are,
and become whom they are, in
terms of possessing their own
land, surely this will have a
tremendous effect on our peo-

le.”

: Mrs. Jeannette Morgan, who
travelled with her husband,
spoke of life in Santiago, of the
progress that has been made,
such as in housing, and the long
way they have yet to go to over-
come earlier shortcomings.

She mentioned the speech of
Dr. Allende, president of Chile,
when he was awarded the Curé
Medal for Peace. He said then
that changes in Chile under his
leadership, would be made with-
in the democratic process under
the 160-year-old Constitution.

Western Tour

The Toronto. meeting was the
starting point of a western tour
which will take Mr. and Mrs.
Morgan to Winnipeg, Saskatoon,
Edmonton, Vancouver, Calgary,
Regina, and Thunder Bay.

The chairman of the meeting,
the Rev. I. G.- Perkins, a sup-
porter of the Canadian peace
movement for almost a quarter
century, was introduced by an-
other long-time peace defender,
Eva Sanderson. Peace funds were
donated by the audience after
an appeal by Executive-Secret-
ary Jean Vautour.

Mr. Morgan explained recent
changes in the Canadian Peace
Congress, mentioning the contri-
bution previously ‘made by Dr. J.
G. Endicott, ‘“‘even though the
Congress and he have, agree-
ably and understandably, parted
because of differences about
ideas of what is happening in
certain parts of the world.”

Commenting on the U.S. elec-
tion, Mr. Morgan said he had
been “intrigued to note that the

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presidential part of that election
went* massively to a man who
has made his career on the basis
of total chicanery,” but that, in
reality, ‘only a tiny handful of
people there want to keep that
war going.”

Only a tiny handful, he said,
wanted to make war elsewhere
as well.

Struggle in Chile

“J wish all of you had been
in Santiago,” he told the aud-
ience, “to meet these people,
who day by day, year by year,
fight the battles for the good
life for their people. They are
fighting people within their
country who are taking from
the poor what belongs to all;
they are fighting those from
outside who have come in and
taken over as in Argentina.”

He warned that the Argen-
tine military government was
buying “the most sophisticated,

‘the most expensive, the most

volatile (military) hardware you
can imagine, for use not only
in handling the problems of
their own country, but we fear,
if things don’t go right, for use
in international adventures in
Latin America.”

Combine Argentina’s long
border with Chile and people
who consider Chile’s “social-
ism” a problem, and any pro-
voked conflict on the border
could push the whole thing
“out of the area of an internal
struggle for social justice in
Chile,” into an inter-state strug-
gle. “I do not need to tell you
where some of the money and
motivation comes from.”

Peace Means Struggite
To people who are_ thus

threatened, the World Peace —

Council is essential, Mr. Mor-
gan stated.

“Peace means struggle — in
those countries where if they
don’t get control of their own
civilization, the minerals under-
ground, control of their whole
situation; if people from out-
side can continue to come in
and take over—we will be
in one Vietnamese situation
after another.”

Dr. Allende, he said, was an
example of a man who had
“given his life to the concept of
the right of people to own and
to process and to use properly,
in interaction with other na-
tions, what they are standing
on, namely, their own country.
Allende has taught this for over
40 years, as a dedicated doctor
and politician in Chile.”

Mr. Morgan listed  difficul-
ties inherited by the Allende
government from earlier times.
Seventy percent of income from
foreign trade comes from cop-
per. So when copper prices are
rigged ‘ downwards, or “incre-
dible” court cases deprive Chile
of that income, or international
banking outfits won’t nego-
tiate long-term loans, what hap-
pens?

“You don’t have to. drop
bombs,” Mr. Morgan said. ‘You
can shrink their income. When
you do that it’s almost as effec-
tive as if you were dropping
bombs from the sky.”

Past of Chile

Traditionally, almost 65% of
Chile’s land was owned by 1.1%
of the population,’ not to be
farmed but “banked” for ruling
class heirs. Therefore, two-
thirds of needed food had to
be, and still has to be, import-
ed. When Dr. Allende was
elected, he delivered one of the

John and Jeannette Morgan.

things he had promised—“every
child, from nursery on up
through the grades of elemen-
tary school receives a half-litre
of milk per day.

“But if you lower the price of
copper, if you make it hard to
get a loan, if you make interest
rates prohibitive, you are shrink-
ing everything,” including the
amount of milk available to
children.

It is because of this econo-
mic warfare. against people
striving for life that today’s
peace movement “is rooted in
the needs of human beings for
national development all around
the world,” Mr. Morgan said.

In Chile, he pointed out, ‘‘un-
der the old constitution, the
people who owned and ran that
country, had shored themselves
up by providing that unless you
read and write, you couldn’t
vote.” Today, 43% of Chileans
still cannot read or write.

Denial of Rights

“So, if there is an election,

Allende is competing strenuous-

y a
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ly for votes, among a large sec-
tion of the electorate who will
be opposed to him; and his peo-
ple who are behind him can’t
vote.”

It is this denial of rights to
the underpriviledged, while
binding the Allende government
to the Constitution, which rais-
es the danger of civil war.

“Allende wants to be the first
government in history,’ Mr.
Morgan reported, “to prove that
a goverment based upon Marx-
ist principles, can not only be
voted in, but succeed under a
constitution put together dur-
ing another system.

What is tragic, said the speak-
er, is that “there is no question
but what in Vietnam in 1954-55,
Ho Chi Min would, by popular
vote, have been the first gov-
ernment in the world to do it

that way,” had *the. United’

States not sabotaged the elec-
tions.

“We have a stake in the suc-
cess of this incredible experi-
ment in Chile,” he said.

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