By Dave McKee
Three days after the illegal US attack on Venezuela, during which it kidnapped the country’s president, Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand posted a statement on X. “This is a regime that Canada opposed since it stole the 2018 election,” she wrote. “Now Canada’s focus is on supporting the democratic will of the Venezuelan people.”
There are, of course, myriad ways that this “democratic rights” position of the Canadian government could be torn apart and exposed as hypocritical. But here’s one that most people wouldn’t think of – it’s got to do with Poland.
On December 4, Poland’s Constitutional Court banned the Communist Party of Poland. The decision was the latest in a long line of attacks on the Communist Party, including a similar attempt to ban it five years ago which failed. It reflects an escalating anti-communist trend among governments in Europe with the support of the European Union, and in the United States with Donald Trump’s Anti-Communism Week.
We might ask, then, why Anita Anand hasn’t spoken out about the democratic rights of working people of Poland – do they not have a democratic right to belong to, participate in and vote for their own party, even if it happens to be the Communist Party? Poland is, after all, one of Canada’s NATO allies – committed, as we are told, to upholding democracy throughout the globe.
Well, it just happens that Poland’s ban, and the anti-communist escalation in general, is happening as the Communist Party of Poland and other communist parties and progressive forces around the world are mobilizing against imperialist wars and aggressions, the skyrocketing arms budgets of NATO countries, deepening social contradictions of capitalism, and intensifying attacks on working people.
Meaning, of course, that they are mobilizing against all those social and political and economic ills that Anand and the Canadian government stand for. They even stand for anti-communist, through their endorsement of “Black Ribbon Day” and the “Victims of Communism” memorial, both of which purposely distort history and equate communism with the horrors of fascism.
So much for the “democratic rights” argument.
Canada’s non-response in the case of the wholly undemocratic ban on the Communist Party of Poland shines a fair bit of light on its response to the wholly illegal US attack on Venezuela.
Ottawa turns a blind eye to an anti-communist escalation because it supports clamping down on parties and movements who are mobilizing against war and military spending, who are organizing resistance to attacks on working people, and who are exposing capitalism as the source of the vast majority of social, economic, political and environmental problems today. In the same say, it ignores the fact that the US aggression is a violation of international law because it supports action to neutralize governments who threaten to oppose imperialist war or the foreign plunder of natural resources.democ
We could ask: Is it really too much to expect the government to recognize the basics of international law and accept its responsibility to defend them?
Apparently, under 21st century capitalism, it is far too much.
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