Review Put people's welfare first

FHE people of this country may

well ask their MPs what they were doing last week when a cold War appropriation budget of b1,755,000,000 passed the douse of Commons without so Much as a protest from any sorner of the House?

These military expenditures present almost half of the total lational revenue. We have “‘no Money’ for education, social ervices, decent pensions for the iged, the blind and the disabled.

e have ‘“‘no money”’ for sports, fecreation or health. But we have unlimited funds for radar net- works that are obsolete before they are completed, for military spending that the current inter- hational situation is demonstra- ting as needless.

The St. Laurent government, and particularly its cabinet, has grown fat and arrogant in office. It has become contempuous of the people, contemptuous of even ts own back-benchers. Other- Wise it would realize that cold War spending on an undiminish- ed scale is contrary to: ever Popular sentiment and need.

This military appropriation is at once part and parcel of the selling out of our natural re- sources to the United States. It is the burden imposed upon the Canadian people by the St. Laurent government's policy of

integration,’ which robs us of our independence.

_The real defense of the People’s interests lies in inter- hational friendship and trade, in ifting the burden of armaments So that we can provide properly

for the people’s health and Welfare,

a

Pacific Tribune

Published weekly at Room 6 — 426 Main Street Vancouver 4, B.C. Phone: MArine 5288 A: Editor —- TOM McEWEN . Sociate Editor — HAL GRIFFIN Usiness Manager — RITA WHYTE Subscription Rates: One Year: $4.00 Six months: $2.25 Ec naaian and Commonwealth pou Ties (except Australia): $4.00 4 year. Australia, United States nd all other countries: $5.00 one year,

_. . Comment

Forty-two years afterward

FORTY-TWO years ago this

week, on- thé morning of August 4, the guns of the First World War roared their. defi- ance to sanity and drenched the world in blood for four long years.

Long before the actual out- break of war the battle lines were already well drawn. All that was needed to touch off the holacaust was an “‘incident’? — and an assassination at Sarajevo provided it?

Among the millions of dead

and maimed to ‘‘make the world safe for democracy’ were 60,000

Canadians.

The —“Bie > Four,”

years later to the Second.

Happily, on this forty-second —

Lloyd George, Clemenceau, Orlando and Woodrow Wilson conclud- ed the First World War with the Treaty of Versailles which achieved, not the making of the the world “‘safe for democracy’’ but the perpetuation of the very that

policies which produced the First World War and led 21

anniversary of the First World War the peoples of the new socialist world. and the old capitalist world alike are de claring with ever - increasing volume and strength — Never again. 3

Now the peoples are saving world for peace, ‘their strength the only sure guarantee friendship between the nations will prevail against the H-bomb maniacs who would set nation against nation to save their own imperialist rule.

Tom McEwen

STALE yarn, written with

the idea in mind that work- ers have short memories, is go- ling the rounds. It appeared first in the New York Times and a lot of the big dailies, like crows selecting a piece of carri- on, have reprinted it. The Van- couver Sun gave it a whirl in its July 11 edition.

This yarn is entitled, ‘“Poz- nan, Pittsburg. Two Strikes Reveal Difference In Ways of Red, Free Worlds.’ The theme is an old one that, when work- ers go on strike “for bread” in socialist countries they are met with tanks and guns and ruth- lessly shot down.

In the capitalist countries no- thing like that ever happened or could happen. Who could even “imagine” steelworkers march- ing “through the streets of Pitts- burg... shouting we want bread

. or that tanks would rumble down the streets of Gary (Indi- ana), or that machine’ guns would be unlimbered in front of the railway station in Cleve- land?”

Who indeed, except the com- mon people who are presumed to have such very short memo- ries! With amazing gall this article tells us, “Our workers do not have to march for bread, nor do they have to die to make their voice heard.”

xt $e % Z

I am not an expert. on what happened at Poznan. From what I have read, I think the authori- ties messed it up a good deal on two main counts: first, by failure-to deal promptly with the workers’ legitimate grievances, and second, by failure to round up the hooligan riff-raff on the U.S. State Department’s ‘Pro- ject X” payroll, the specialists in every form of diversion, dis- ruption and anti-government activities (under the direction of Allan Dulles, brother of the “misguided missile’ who serves as U.S. secretary of state) who sought to exploit the workers’ grievances for their own. ends.

But let’s get back to “Pitts- burg” and our own lily-white trusts, cartels and corporations.

If we were to use every page of this paper for the next twelve months to record the killings, the terror and the ruthless vio- lence against American and Ca- nadian workers by these kindly capitalists, we would still be short of space to tell the whole story!

Ask the hard-rock miners, the lumber workers, the coal miners, the furniture and textile work- ers, the tens of thousands who lived through the years of the Hungry Thirties — all struggl- ing for unionization in order to win “bread.”

They can tell of armed forces, of hordes of special police, pro- vocateurs and stoolpigeons, of tanks and guns and the cold- blooded murder of countless scores of workers who organiz- ed ‘for bread” and .got a bullet, a vigifante lynching mob or a prison cell. .

Yes, things were undoubtedly bad in Poznan — but only a fleabite by comparison with how they have been, and will be ‘again, in all the “Pittsburgs” of capitalist exploitation. Let’s not get too forgetful when the mo- nopoly press sings Te Deums to our freedom to struggle “for bread”. Too many graves mark the trail of struggle!

August 3, 1956 —PACIFIC TRIBUNE — PAGE 7