The Lady Moves From Left To Right by Dave Jaffe
By the time of her late 40's, Mary Anne Burns was a rich woman. She was a good lawyer and had always been a strong personality. When someone told her that he was Jewish, she said. "Oh you're a Jew are you? Jews do things that they don't always want to do. But they do them to succeed." The man replied that this was true of many immigrants to Canada.
"Maybe," Mary Ann replied. "But I think it's truer of Jews than anyone else."
She told a man who kept coming around to see her. "I don't want you around me anymore. You're always looking at me in a strange scanning way. Just stay away from me. ."
Another man who told her he was using New Age therapy to improve his life, was told that Burns didn't have any faith in such type of therapy. "The only therapy that counts for me," she told him, "is therapy whose results can be measured scientifically. You can't do that with New Age therapy. That's why I have no time for it."
Burns' personality gave her an edge in courtroom and office showdowns. She wasn't scared of confrontations. She welcomed them and often won them.
One day in the 1990's she went to a provincial Conservative meeting just for a change. The New Democratic Party was in power in Ontario but it wasn't popular. And Burns didn't like the federal Liberals either. "They're always trying to hug the middle ground," someone told her. That didn't appeal to Burns.
At the Conservative meeting Burns saw and heard the new Conservative leader pitch his so-called "Common Sense Revolution". Burns was enthralled. "I just loved what he was saying," she said. "It was just awesome.He talked about tax cuts, getting rid of wasteful social programs, and stopping governments from strangling businesses in red tape - I liked all of this. "
Like most conservatives, who didn't like welfare or unemployment insurance programs, Harris said nothing about the billions of dollars in subsidies that private businesses get every year from governments. In the 1990's for example, the energy industries were getting an annual total of over $35 billion in subsidies from all governments. Burns in the past ten years had worked with private resource firms that faced government regulation. The government laws often frustrated Burns's clients as did the bureaucratic arrogance she claimed that came her way from government officials.
Also Burns may have felt a little guilty about her yippie past. She remained a radical. This was who she was. So she swung from the extreme left to the far right. So she joined the Conservative Party. She helped write its very conservative policies. She raised money for the Tories. Yet she never ran for office. She kept in the background. She was now a hard core right winger.
After she'd spoken to Barry Nakamura, he never saw her again. And he knew that seeing her again would be a bad idea. Like many others before her, this lady had left the left forever.
Monday 30 January 2017
Right, Left and Centre: Part Seven; The Lady That Moved From Left to Right. by Dave Jaffe
The Lady That Moved From Left to Right; by Dave Jaffe. Part Seven
"We had fun," Mary Anne Burns said about some of her actions in the late 1960's and early 1970's. This fun included about three dozen yippies invading the United States border town of Blaine, Washington. This was a counterattack against the U.S. invasion of Cambodia in the spring of 1970.
The yippies had been founded by Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman in New York City in late 1967. The yippies combined the hippie lifestyle with left wing politics. The yippies of B.C. were political rebels who often lived in what were called 'crash pads'. Here sometimes a dozen or more young people lived in old homes and shared things in common.
They smoked marijuana in the open, played loud rock music by people like Bob Dylan, Chilliwack, Mock Duck, the Jefferson Airplane and the Beatles. Men and women paired off usually without marrying. Man and women grew their hair long and the men often grew long beards. All wore very casual dress like jeans and T-Shirts. Many hippies lived in Kitsilano, the west side area that sat on the south edge of the Burrard Inlet. The yippies read 'The I Ching'. Yet some of the yippies also looked through works by Mao Tse Tung, Pierre Vallieres, Frantz Fanon, Malcolm X, and other revolutionary authors.
At one time yippies broke into the American consulate and siezed the American Eagle from the embassy's wall. "We carried it outside," one yippie recalled. "To us it was a symbol of all that was wrong in the world. You see we were revolutionaries."
Yet the revolution never came, at least not in Canada. Apart from Quebec, Canada is a very conservative country. And governments noticed the yippies and started to deal with them. "How do you move a donkey?" one saying went. "It's quite simple. You just use the carrot and the stick." The Trudeau government brought in locally controlled Local Initiatives Projects and Opportunity for Youth Programs to quiet the demonstrators with jobs. That was the carrot. Then the Vancouver Police rioted in the summer of 1971 and beat up hippies and yippies who were demonstrating against anti-marijuana laws. This was the stick.
Then came the economic downturn of the 1970's. Two massive oil price hikes in the 1970's ground the economy to a halt and now even yippies started to worry about their future. The same thing happened to Trotskyists, Communists and Maoists who were the rivals of the yippies in the streets of Vancouver. "Children get older," sang Fleetwood Mac. So did all these groups. They began to marry, raise children and get jobs. By 1975, the New Left, which was basically a youth movement, was history. Still, it did help change Canada, freeing it up in so many ways. Casual dress, casual drugs, casual sex and eastern religions for a time became the new orthodoxy.
History moved along and so did Mary Anne Burns. She and Ken split up and Mary Anne moved rightward. She took up with another man who was active in the bus drivers' union. She hung out with New Democrats for a while. Later in the 1970's, her father, a mining engineer made a big mineral discovery in central America. Mary Anne now had a rich father. She headed east to Toronto and took a law degree at the University of Toronto.
She ended up working in a Bay Street law firm and married another lawyer. The days of running with the yippies were now far behind her.
"We had fun," Mary Anne Burns said about some of her actions in the late 1960's and early 1970's. This fun included about three dozen yippies invading the United States border town of Blaine, Washington. This was a counterattack against the U.S. invasion of Cambodia in the spring of 1970.
The yippies had been founded by Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman in New York City in late 1967. The yippies combined the hippie lifestyle with left wing politics. The yippies of B.C. were political rebels who often lived in what were called 'crash pads'. Here sometimes a dozen or more young people lived in old homes and shared things in common.
They smoked marijuana in the open, played loud rock music by people like Bob Dylan, Chilliwack, Mock Duck, the Jefferson Airplane and the Beatles. Men and women paired off usually without marrying. Man and women grew their hair long and the men often grew long beards. All wore very casual dress like jeans and T-Shirts. Many hippies lived in Kitsilano, the west side area that sat on the south edge of the Burrard Inlet. The yippies read 'The I Ching'. Yet some of the yippies also looked through works by Mao Tse Tung, Pierre Vallieres, Frantz Fanon, Malcolm X, and other revolutionary authors.
At one time yippies broke into the American consulate and siezed the American Eagle from the embassy's wall. "We carried it outside," one yippie recalled. "To us it was a symbol of all that was wrong in the world. You see we were revolutionaries."
Yet the revolution never came, at least not in Canada. Apart from Quebec, Canada is a very conservative country. And governments noticed the yippies and started to deal with them. "How do you move a donkey?" one saying went. "It's quite simple. You just use the carrot and the stick." The Trudeau government brought in locally controlled Local Initiatives Projects and Opportunity for Youth Programs to quiet the demonstrators with jobs. That was the carrot. Then the Vancouver Police rioted in the summer of 1971 and beat up hippies and yippies who were demonstrating against anti-marijuana laws. This was the stick.
Then came the economic downturn of the 1970's. Two massive oil price hikes in the 1970's ground the economy to a halt and now even yippies started to worry about their future. The same thing happened to Trotskyists, Communists and Maoists who were the rivals of the yippies in the streets of Vancouver. "Children get older," sang Fleetwood Mac. So did all these groups. They began to marry, raise children and get jobs. By 1975, the New Left, which was basically a youth movement, was history. Still, it did help change Canada, freeing it up in so many ways. Casual dress, casual drugs, casual sex and eastern religions for a time became the new orthodoxy.
History moved along and so did Mary Anne Burns. She and Ken split up and Mary Anne moved rightward. She took up with another man who was active in the bus drivers' union. She hung out with New Democrats for a while. Later in the 1970's, her father, a mining engineer made a big mineral discovery in central America. Mary Anne now had a rich father. She headed east to Toronto and took a law degree at the University of Toronto.
She ended up working in a Bay Street law firm and married another lawyer. The days of running with the yippies were now far behind her.
Monday 23 January 2017
Right, Left and Center: The Politics of Some Canadians by Dave Jaffe: Part Six; The Lady That Moved From left to Right.
Right, Left and Centre: Part Six; The Lady That Moved From Left to Right
Preface: All the people in these blogs are real. But I've changed their names.
When Barry Nakamura came to Toronto in the late 1990's, he didn't think he'd meet anyone from his past. "I just wanted to see Central Canada," this 50 something postal worker said. "I'd never been back east before."
Yet one early morning in late November, Barry was sitting in a restaurant in downtown Toronto. A woman dressed in business clothes and a dark overcoat approached this former yippie. "You're Barry aren't you?" this woman who carried a briefcase and was wearing high heels and glasses said. "You were a left winger."
Barry admitted that he had been on the left at one time. Now he was a strong supporter of his union but that was the extent of his politics now. "I'm Mary Anne Evans," this woman said. "Now I'm part of the Mike Harris Revolution." This woman who was about Barry's age then launched into a full scale right wing political speech. As she did, Barry Nakamura now remembered her. She had joined the yippies in Vancouver, just about the same time he had. She'd taken part in demonstrations against the Vietnam War, organized people to demonstrate against Pierre Elliot Trudeau's imposing the War Measures Act, called policemen 'Pigs', and threw rocks and bottles at police when they clashed with the yippies in street demonstrations.
Back then just like Barry, Mary Anne Burns had called herself " A Revolutionary." Now she told Barry, "I'm against welfare. I'm not in favour of unemployment insurance. Those programs just encourage people to sit on their behinds and do nothing." She told Barry that she was no longer a bleeding heart radical. "I'm a conservative lawyer and I'm damn proud of it." Then Evans vanished. Nakamura sat for about a half an hour afterwards, nursing a cup of coffee and thinking how people changed.
For when Barry and Mary Anne first met, this brown haired woman was in her late 20's and was living a very different life than she did now. Back then she was in love with Ken Farmakides who had a nine year old daughter named Dara. Ken was a tall muscular American who came to Canada in the late 1960's to avoid the draft and fighting in the Vietnam War.
Ken, Mary Anne and Dara, were out and out hippies. Worse yet they were yippies or left wing hippies.They lived in Surrey, then a rough suburb of Vancouver. Ken flew the flag of the National Liberation Front, of Vietnam, outside their scruffy house. The NLF were Vietnamese communists who were then engaged in total war with the United States in Vietnam. Also Mary Anne, Ken and Dara were living on welfare. "Living in Surrey was no picnic," Mary Anne recalled a few years later. "But we did have fun."
Preface: All the people in these blogs are real. But I've changed their names.
When Barry Nakamura came to Toronto in the late 1990's, he didn't think he'd meet anyone from his past. "I just wanted to see Central Canada," this 50 something postal worker said. "I'd never been back east before."
Yet one early morning in late November, Barry was sitting in a restaurant in downtown Toronto. A woman dressed in business clothes and a dark overcoat approached this former yippie. "You're Barry aren't you?" this woman who carried a briefcase and was wearing high heels and glasses said. "You were a left winger."
Barry admitted that he had been on the left at one time. Now he was a strong supporter of his union but that was the extent of his politics now. "I'm Mary Anne Evans," this woman said. "Now I'm part of the Mike Harris Revolution." This woman who was about Barry's age then launched into a full scale right wing political speech. As she did, Barry Nakamura now remembered her. She had joined the yippies in Vancouver, just about the same time he had. She'd taken part in demonstrations against the Vietnam War, organized people to demonstrate against Pierre Elliot Trudeau's imposing the War Measures Act, called policemen 'Pigs', and threw rocks and bottles at police when they clashed with the yippies in street demonstrations.
Back then just like Barry, Mary Anne Burns had called herself " A Revolutionary." Now she told Barry, "I'm against welfare. I'm not in favour of unemployment insurance. Those programs just encourage people to sit on their behinds and do nothing." She told Barry that she was no longer a bleeding heart radical. "I'm a conservative lawyer and I'm damn proud of it." Then Evans vanished. Nakamura sat for about a half an hour afterwards, nursing a cup of coffee and thinking how people changed.
For when Barry and Mary Anne first met, this brown haired woman was in her late 20's and was living a very different life than she did now. Back then she was in love with Ken Farmakides who had a nine year old daughter named Dara. Ken was a tall muscular American who came to Canada in the late 1960's to avoid the draft and fighting in the Vietnam War.
Ken, Mary Anne and Dara, were out and out hippies. Worse yet they were yippies or left wing hippies.They lived in Surrey, then a rough suburb of Vancouver. Ken flew the flag of the National Liberation Front, of Vietnam, outside their scruffy house. The NLF were Vietnamese communists who were then engaged in total war with the United States in Vietnam. Also Mary Anne, Ken and Dara were living on welfare. "Living in Surrey was no picnic," Mary Anne recalled a few years later. "But we did have fun."
Wednesday 18 January 2017
Right, Left and Centre: The Politics of Some Canadians by Dave Jaffe; Part Five
Right, Left and Centre: The Politics of Some Canadians - Part Five.
Clayton Sorich's paper on Soviet medicare would have left people thinking that the Soviet medicare system was totally bad and should never be copied anywhere. Yet this is really a half truth. While Clayton was exposing the bad points of the Soviet system, the U.S. medicare system had its flaws too.
By the 1990's, the United States was the only country in the western world where many of its citizens weren't part of any medicare plan. One in six Americans in fact, didn't belong to any medicare plan. As a result, over 90,000 Americans went bankrupt every year from medicare bills. More than 20,000 Americans died every year from lack of medical care.
U.S. President Barack Obama's Affordable Health Care Act was supposed to solve these problems. In 2009 Obama made a promise. "We need," he told the American Medical Association, " a comprehensive reform that covers everyone. It will provide affordable health insurance to every single American."
Yet Obama's promise never came true. 20 million Americans signed up for what's now called 'Obamacare'. Still, 30 million Americans or one in ten citizens, have no medical coverage. And medical costs in the U.S. just keep on rising.
Meanwhile in Africa, and parts of Asia and Latin America some people have no medical care at all. As Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn point out in their book 'Half The Sky' over half a million women died every year from pregnancy. More than 5 million women are permamently injured from having babies. In these poor countries where over 2 billion people live, a Soviet style medicare system would save the lives of millions of women and men too.
Clayton's anti-communism has blinded him to the positive side of some parts of communism.
Now nearly 30years later, the Soviet system has vanished. So has Yugoslavia and the East German Democratic Republic In Europe and Russia, socialism is history where once it ruled. Yet inadequate or non-existent medicare is a fact of life in large parts of the world.
Clayton, Milan and Maria Sorich and the rest of their family are right to condemn communist tyranny. Yet they are wrong to ignore a few of the benefits that communism brought to the Soviet Union and parts of Eastern Europe. And one big benefit was government run medicare. It's still needed in parts of the world including parts of the U.S. of A.
Clayton Sorich's paper on Soviet medicare would have left people thinking that the Soviet medicare system was totally bad and should never be copied anywhere. Yet this is really a half truth. While Clayton was exposing the bad points of the Soviet system, the U.S. medicare system had its flaws too.
By the 1990's, the United States was the only country in the western world where many of its citizens weren't part of any medicare plan. One in six Americans in fact, didn't belong to any medicare plan. As a result, over 90,000 Americans went bankrupt every year from medicare bills. More than 20,000 Americans died every year from lack of medical care.
U.S. President Barack Obama's Affordable Health Care Act was supposed to solve these problems. In 2009 Obama made a promise. "We need," he told the American Medical Association, " a comprehensive reform that covers everyone. It will provide affordable health insurance to every single American."
Yet Obama's promise never came true. 20 million Americans signed up for what's now called 'Obamacare'. Still, 30 million Americans or one in ten citizens, have no medical coverage. And medical costs in the U.S. just keep on rising.
Meanwhile in Africa, and parts of Asia and Latin America some people have no medical care at all. As Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn point out in their book 'Half The Sky' over half a million women died every year from pregnancy. More than 5 million women are permamently injured from having babies. In these poor countries where over 2 billion people live, a Soviet style medicare system would save the lives of millions of women and men too.
Clayton's anti-communism has blinded him to the positive side of some parts of communism.
Now nearly 30years later, the Soviet system has vanished. So has Yugoslavia and the East German Democratic Republic In Europe and Russia, socialism is history where once it ruled. Yet inadequate or non-existent medicare is a fact of life in large parts of the world.
Clayton, Milan and Maria Sorich and the rest of their family are right to condemn communist tyranny. Yet they are wrong to ignore a few of the benefits that communism brought to the Soviet Union and parts of Eastern Europe. And one big benefit was government run medicare. It's still needed in parts of the world including parts of the U.S. of A.
Tuesday 17 January 2017
Right, Left and Centre: The Politics of Some Canadians. By Dave Jaffe - Part Four
Taking Aim At Soviet Medicare Right, Left and Centre by Dave Jaffe
Milan and Maria never forgot the horrors of Yugoslavia and East Germany. "It was terrible," Maria said about her life in East Germany. "Just a nightmare." Many of her childhood memories were of long days in drafty schools and her return by foot to her family's crowded apartment building where her five member family survived on porridge on potatoes. Part of the problems back then could be blamed on the terrible effects of the Second World War. Not all of the country's problems were caused by communism. Yet Maria and Milan forgot that or never factored it in.
Clayton their son had a far different childhood. He grew up in Burnaby, a growing working class suburb just to Vancouver's east. He played hockey but also learned to play the piano, sing operatic songs, read poetry by Rilke and loved to read literature. "I loved Ivo Andric's book 'The Bridge On The Drina',: Clayton says. "It was all about Yugoslavia's history."
Yet Clayton also read works by Dosteovsky, Thomas Mann, and many other novels by famous European authors. Like his parents, Clayton remained a firm anti-communist. When he met pro-communist students and Marxist students at university, he didn't argue with them. He just remained silent and smiled when he heard them speak. He knew what communism was all about: His parents had told him all about that. The communists couldn't fool him.
So when his sociology professor set up an assignment that would show flaws in the Soviet system, Clayton nearly leaped at the chance. He was only too happy to zero on on the Soviet medicare system. If he could prove that the communist medicare system had big gaping flaws, then this would prove that all of communism was a fraud.
So Clayton set to work. He studied Soviet statistics. He pored over big heavy volumes from U.S. think tanks. (Remember: This was in the pre-Internet age.), He interviewed immigrants from the Soviet Union about their medicare experiences. Clayton dubbed the Soviet immigrants he spoke to "Soviet Union survivors". And by and large, Clayton proved his points. Medicare patients in the Soviet Union did sometimes receive rough treatment. In some instances, there were long waiting periods for certain procedures. People at the top of the communist heirarchy often got far better treatment than those below them. And some of the treatments didn't help people as much as the medicare people promised they would."I think I've done my work on this paper," Clayton said. "The Soviet medicare system has many faults." Clayton's professor agreed and gave Clayton's paper an A minus mark.
Socialist medicare doesn't work most people would think after reading Clayton's paper.
Milan and Maria never forgot the horrors of Yugoslavia and East Germany. "It was terrible," Maria said about her life in East Germany. "Just a nightmare." Many of her childhood memories were of long days in drafty schools and her return by foot to her family's crowded apartment building where her five member family survived on porridge on potatoes. Part of the problems back then could be blamed on the terrible effects of the Second World War. Not all of the country's problems were caused by communism. Yet Maria and Milan forgot that or never factored it in.
Clayton their son had a far different childhood. He grew up in Burnaby, a growing working class suburb just to Vancouver's east. He played hockey but also learned to play the piano, sing operatic songs, read poetry by Rilke and loved to read literature. "I loved Ivo Andric's book 'The Bridge On The Drina',: Clayton says. "It was all about Yugoslavia's history."
Yet Clayton also read works by Dosteovsky, Thomas Mann, and many other novels by famous European authors. Like his parents, Clayton remained a firm anti-communist. When he met pro-communist students and Marxist students at university, he didn't argue with them. He just remained silent and smiled when he heard them speak. He knew what communism was all about: His parents had told him all about that. The communists couldn't fool him.
So when his sociology professor set up an assignment that would show flaws in the Soviet system, Clayton nearly leaped at the chance. He was only too happy to zero on on the Soviet medicare system. If he could prove that the communist medicare system had big gaping flaws, then this would prove that all of communism was a fraud.
So Clayton set to work. He studied Soviet statistics. He pored over big heavy volumes from U.S. think tanks. (Remember: This was in the pre-Internet age.), He interviewed immigrants from the Soviet Union about their medicare experiences. Clayton dubbed the Soviet immigrants he spoke to "Soviet Union survivors". And by and large, Clayton proved his points. Medicare patients in the Soviet Union did sometimes receive rough treatment. In some instances, there were long waiting periods for certain procedures. People at the top of the communist heirarchy often got far better treatment than those below them. And some of the treatments didn't help people as much as the medicare people promised they would."I think I've done my work on this paper," Clayton said. "The Soviet medicare system has many faults." Clayton's professor agreed and gave Clayton's paper an A minus mark.
Socialist medicare doesn't work most people would think after reading Clayton's paper.
Saturday 7 January 2017
Right, Left and Centre: The Politics of Some Canadians by Dave Jaffe - Part Three.
Right, Left and Centre - Part Three by Dave Jaffe; Taking Aim At Soviet Medicare
"My son is busy," says Milan about his 22 year old son Clayton. And Clayton is surely busy. He's proving that the Soviet medicare system mistreats its patients and doesn''t provide decent care to everybody.
It was all part of a 1988 social studies project at a local university. A short, dark, handsome man, Clayton remembers his father's talks about growing up in Yugoslavia. Milan came of age in Yugoslavia right at the end of World War Two. In 1945 Yugoslavia was surely no paradise. A brutal ciivil war erupted in 1940 when German and Italian troops occupied the country.
Croats and Serbians butchered each other while German and Italian armies killed communists and right wing nationalists who resisted their invasion. At war's end over 7 per cent of the population was dead, killed in the conflict. The country's new leader,was Tito. Born Josip Broz, Tito led his army to a victory over the invaders and the right wing Croats. Tito was a communist who ruled his country, especially at the beginning of his time in power, with an iron hand.
He tried also to downplay the terrible ethnic wars that had killed so many Croats and Serbs. "I never knew Tito's ethnic background," Milenka, another former Yugoslav citizen said. "And I don't think too many other people knew it either." Tito tried to forge a nation out of the country's hate-hardened groups. But it was a tough job and Tito's methods were harsh.
After the war ended, the communist rulers herded hundreds of thousands of people into labour camps. The camp's resident were anti-communists, pro-Nazis and others. About 700,000 Yugoslavs died in these camps. Milan escaped to the west and after quite a journey, ended up in Canada. At last he made his way to Vanncouver. A hard working man, Milan set up his own construction company and flourished in the 1960's and after. He married Maria, another refugee from communism. She grew up in the German Democratic Republic or what came to be called 'East Germany'.
Many of Maria's childhood memories were of long days in cold drafty schools. Sher would return by foot to a crowded apartment where her four member family survived on porridge and potatoes. "It was terrible," Maria said about her life in the GDR years later. "It was a nightmare."
Milan and Maria soon had a family of themselves and their two children, Clayton and Teresa. As soon as they turned 15 both of them ended up working in their father's company.Their mother Maria told the children, "We work hard here. You must go out and help your father." Clayton learned to do drywall, saw planks of wood and hammer nails.
Teresa who was two years younger than Clayton learned bookkeeping. Later she became a chartered accountant. The Sorich family, which was Milan's surname, was a typical Canadian success story. They were middle class people who had escaped poverty and oppression to haul themselves into the middle class. There were many success stories just like the Sorich family in post World War Two Canada. To many of these people it was a golden age.
"My son is busy," says Milan about his 22 year old son Clayton. And Clayton is surely busy. He's proving that the Soviet medicare system mistreats its patients and doesn''t provide decent care to everybody.
It was all part of a 1988 social studies project at a local university. A short, dark, handsome man, Clayton remembers his father's talks about growing up in Yugoslavia. Milan came of age in Yugoslavia right at the end of World War Two. In 1945 Yugoslavia was surely no paradise. A brutal ciivil war erupted in 1940 when German and Italian troops occupied the country.
Croats and Serbians butchered each other while German and Italian armies killed communists and right wing nationalists who resisted their invasion. At war's end over 7 per cent of the population was dead, killed in the conflict. The country's new leader,was Tito. Born Josip Broz, Tito led his army to a victory over the invaders and the right wing Croats. Tito was a communist who ruled his country, especially at the beginning of his time in power, with an iron hand.
He tried also to downplay the terrible ethnic wars that had killed so many Croats and Serbs. "I never knew Tito's ethnic background," Milenka, another former Yugoslav citizen said. "And I don't think too many other people knew it either." Tito tried to forge a nation out of the country's hate-hardened groups. But it was a tough job and Tito's methods were harsh.
After the war ended, the communist rulers herded hundreds of thousands of people into labour camps. The camp's resident were anti-communists, pro-Nazis and others. About 700,000 Yugoslavs died in these camps. Milan escaped to the west and after quite a journey, ended up in Canada. At last he made his way to Vanncouver. A hard working man, Milan set up his own construction company and flourished in the 1960's and after. He married Maria, another refugee from communism. She grew up in the German Democratic Republic or what came to be called 'East Germany'.
Many of Maria's childhood memories were of long days in cold drafty schools. Sher would return by foot to a crowded apartment where her four member family survived on porridge and potatoes. "It was terrible," Maria said about her life in the GDR years later. "It was a nightmare."
Milan and Maria soon had a family of themselves and their two children, Clayton and Teresa. As soon as they turned 15 both of them ended up working in their father's company.Their mother Maria told the children, "We work hard here. You must go out and help your father." Clayton learned to do drywall, saw planks of wood and hammer nails.
Teresa who was two years younger than Clayton learned bookkeeping. Later she became a chartered accountant. The Sorich family, which was Milan's surname, was a typical Canadian success story. They were middle class people who had escaped poverty and oppression to haul themselves into the middle class. There were many success stories just like the Sorich family in post World War Two Canada. To many of these people it was a golden age.
Friday 6 January 2017
Right, Left and Centre: The Politics of Some Canadians. Part Two by Dave Jaffe
Right, Left and Centre: Part Two.
After U.S. forces invaded Afghanistan in 2001, the Bush administration tried to link Saddam Hussein to the events of 9/11. Yet Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11. He didn't like Bin Laden and had no time for the jihadi terrorists. Still, the Bush government kept making Hussein responsible for 9/11 and in March 2003 invaded Iraq. That war is still going on.
"I supported the invasion of Iraq," Jack admits. "I thought it would be a good thing." Here John was on the same page as liberals such as Michael Ignatieff, the former head of the Canadian Liberal Party. Also the American writer George Packer was in favour of the invasion. Over 1 million people have died since the U.S. and other armed forces went into Iraq in 2003. Four to five million people have fled the country and a civil war there still goes on. Last year in 2016 over 8,000 people were killed in the fighting.
John knows a tremendous amount about politics and ethnic groups. Yet he sometimes ignores wars carried out by democracies. His condemns Islamic and communist dictators which is good. Yet sometimes he gives more democratic countries a free pass. John isn't alone on this issue. Many Canadians fell the same way he does.
Three other things stand out in John's politics. First off, he admires and sometimes seem obsessed by what political scientists in Britain call 'C2's'. These are the working class people who vote for conservative political parties in the U.S.A., Great Britain and Canada. Without people like this, the Labour Party in Great Britain, the Democrats in the U.S. and the New Democratic Party in Canada would have won a lot more elections. John also admires the Coalition d'Avenir de Quebec, or the Coalition for Quebec's Future. The CAQ is a Quebec -based party that is supported by soft Quebec nationalists, who are politically conservative. They're often called 'Bleues" or' Blues' in English.
One of the founders of the CAQ is Francois Legault who now has been in at least three parties. Legault served in a Parti Quebecois government. Then he ended up in Ottawa where he served as a Bloc Quebecois Member of Parliament. The Bloc was a federal outgrowth of the Parti Quebecois. Then Legault skipped to the provincial Liberals. He's now a member of CAQ.
"That Legault has sure been in a lot of political parties," says Fred, a former resident of Quebec who now lives British Columbia. "The man's a complete opportunist." John doesn't agree.
Then, too, John never sees to notice the power of big businesses. In recent years, in the U.S.A., Great Britain and Canada, business CEO's have demanded that governments slash social programs, give big businesses and the rich big tax breaks, and pare down government regulation of businesses. Governments have carried out these demands. This is why nearly all English-speaking countries seem to have become more conservative. As Bob Dylan once wrote, "Money doesn't talk, it swears."
Last, John has a wicked sense of humour. He can imitate all sorts of politicians and many types of Canadians. He's made this writer laugh many times.
So John's political views do skew a bit to the right. Yet so too do the politics of many Canadians.
Still if you want to know about the politics of any country in the world, then John's your man. His knowledge of politics will surely impress you.
After U.S. forces invaded Afghanistan in 2001, the Bush administration tried to link Saddam Hussein to the events of 9/11. Yet Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11. He didn't like Bin Laden and had no time for the jihadi terrorists. Still, the Bush government kept making Hussein responsible for 9/11 and in March 2003 invaded Iraq. That war is still going on.
"I supported the invasion of Iraq," Jack admits. "I thought it would be a good thing." Here John was on the same page as liberals such as Michael Ignatieff, the former head of the Canadian Liberal Party. Also the American writer George Packer was in favour of the invasion. Over 1 million people have died since the U.S. and other armed forces went into Iraq in 2003. Four to five million people have fled the country and a civil war there still goes on. Last year in 2016 over 8,000 people were killed in the fighting.
John knows a tremendous amount about politics and ethnic groups. Yet he sometimes ignores wars carried out by democracies. His condemns Islamic and communist dictators which is good. Yet sometimes he gives more democratic countries a free pass. John isn't alone on this issue. Many Canadians fell the same way he does.
Three other things stand out in John's politics. First off, he admires and sometimes seem obsessed by what political scientists in Britain call 'C2's'. These are the working class people who vote for conservative political parties in the U.S.A., Great Britain and Canada. Without people like this, the Labour Party in Great Britain, the Democrats in the U.S. and the New Democratic Party in Canada would have won a lot more elections. John also admires the Coalition d'Avenir de Quebec, or the Coalition for Quebec's Future. The CAQ is a Quebec -based party that is supported by soft Quebec nationalists, who are politically conservative. They're often called 'Bleues" or' Blues' in English.
One of the founders of the CAQ is Francois Legault who now has been in at least three parties. Legault served in a Parti Quebecois government. Then he ended up in Ottawa where he served as a Bloc Quebecois Member of Parliament. The Bloc was a federal outgrowth of the Parti Quebecois. Then Legault skipped to the provincial Liberals. He's now a member of CAQ.
"That Legault has sure been in a lot of political parties," says Fred, a former resident of Quebec who now lives British Columbia. "The man's a complete opportunist." John doesn't agree.
Then, too, John never sees to notice the power of big businesses. In recent years, in the U.S.A., Great Britain and Canada, business CEO's have demanded that governments slash social programs, give big businesses and the rich big tax breaks, and pare down government regulation of businesses. Governments have carried out these demands. This is why nearly all English-speaking countries seem to have become more conservative. As Bob Dylan once wrote, "Money doesn't talk, it swears."
Last, John has a wicked sense of humour. He can imitate all sorts of politicians and many types of Canadians. He's made this writer laugh many times.
So John's political views do skew a bit to the right. Yet so too do the politics of many Canadians.
Still if you want to know about the politics of any country in the world, then John's your man. His knowledge of politics will surely impress you.
Thursday 5 January 2017
Right, Left And Centre; The Politics of Some Canadians by Dave Jaffe. Part One
Right, Left and Center by Dave Jaffe - Part One.
A man I'll call John is a political junkie. Ask John, a 40ish person about any country's politics and ethnic groups, and he'll come up with the right answer. "Now in Afghanistan," he told one person who inquired about that country, "there's Pashtuns and Uzbecks." Then he named all the other Afghani ethnic groups and their politics,. John was right on all counts.
This resident of Vancouver Island has been in the federal Liberal Party since his teenage years. "My mother and father were both Liberals," Jon says. Although John -which isn't his real name- votes now for the provincial New Democratic Party he always votes Liberal in federal elections.
So John is a conservative on many issues. One political atrocity he always mentions was the shooting by East German police of over 700 East German people who were trying to escape communists-ruled East Germany. Communists ruled East Germany from 1945 to 1989 when communism started to collapse. The East German state put up a wall in Berlin in the early 1960's when thousands of East Germans fled their country for West Germany.
"Tear down this wall, Mr. Gorbachev," U.S. president Ronald Reagan proclaimed when he visited West Germany and West Berlin in the 1980"s. Back then, Mikhail Gorbachev headed up the Soviet Union which Reagan and tens of millions of Americans and Canadians despised. John can't forget the deaths at the Berlin Wall and he is right to do so. Yet on the other hand, John says nothing about the U.S.-driven war in Indochina.
From 1954 to 1975, U.S. armed forces killed over 2 million Vietnamese, 300,000 Laotians and 650,000 Cambodians. The United States was trying to prevent all of Indochina from going communist. The U.S. failed but the damage it inflicted on Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos was huge.
John also leaves out the other U.S. wars. In 2003 U.S. troops led a NATO force that invaded Iraq to overthrow Iraq's vicious dictator Saddam Hussein. "He's like Hitler," some people claimed about Hussein, who was indeed a bad man. Still, the U.S. government and its president George W. Bush invaded on the excuse that Husein was behind '9/11'.
'9/11' let's remember was the killing of over 3,000 Americans in New York City, Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania on September 9, 2001. On that day less than 20 young men, all from Saudi Arabia or Morocco hijacked a series of planes and crashed them into the World Trade Centre towers in New York City, the Pentagon in Washington and a field in Pennsylvania.
Soon after 9/11 U.S. troops invaded Afghanistan to hunt down Osama Bin Laden, who supposedly was the mastermind behind '9/11'. Bin Laden escaped to Pakistan where years later U.S. armed forces tracked him down and killed him. This invasion of Afghanistan could be justified on the grounds that Bin Laden was a mass murderer. Yet what came later was wrong. And James was in favour of what happened next.
(End of Part One).
A man I'll call John is a political junkie. Ask John, a 40ish person about any country's politics and ethnic groups, and he'll come up with the right answer. "Now in Afghanistan," he told one person who inquired about that country, "there's Pashtuns and Uzbecks." Then he named all the other Afghani ethnic groups and their politics,. John was right on all counts.
This resident of Vancouver Island has been in the federal Liberal Party since his teenage years. "My mother and father were both Liberals," Jon says. Although John -which isn't his real name- votes now for the provincial New Democratic Party he always votes Liberal in federal elections.
So John is a conservative on many issues. One political atrocity he always mentions was the shooting by East German police of over 700 East German people who were trying to escape communists-ruled East Germany. Communists ruled East Germany from 1945 to 1989 when communism started to collapse. The East German state put up a wall in Berlin in the early 1960's when thousands of East Germans fled their country for West Germany.
"Tear down this wall, Mr. Gorbachev," U.S. president Ronald Reagan proclaimed when he visited West Germany and West Berlin in the 1980"s. Back then, Mikhail Gorbachev headed up the Soviet Union which Reagan and tens of millions of Americans and Canadians despised. John can't forget the deaths at the Berlin Wall and he is right to do so. Yet on the other hand, John says nothing about the U.S.-driven war in Indochina.
From 1954 to 1975, U.S. armed forces killed over 2 million Vietnamese, 300,000 Laotians and 650,000 Cambodians. The United States was trying to prevent all of Indochina from going communist. The U.S. failed but the damage it inflicted on Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos was huge.
John also leaves out the other U.S. wars. In 2003 U.S. troops led a NATO force that invaded Iraq to overthrow Iraq's vicious dictator Saddam Hussein. "He's like Hitler," some people claimed about Hussein, who was indeed a bad man. Still, the U.S. government and its president George W. Bush invaded on the excuse that Husein was behind '9/11'.
'9/11' let's remember was the killing of over 3,000 Americans in New York City, Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania on September 9, 2001. On that day less than 20 young men, all from Saudi Arabia or Morocco hijacked a series of planes and crashed them into the World Trade Centre towers in New York City, the Pentagon in Washington and a field in Pennsylvania.
Soon after 9/11 U.S. troops invaded Afghanistan to hunt down Osama Bin Laden, who supposedly was the mastermind behind '9/11'. Bin Laden escaped to Pakistan where years later U.S. armed forces tracked him down and killed him. This invasion of Afghanistan could be justified on the grounds that Bin Laden was a mass murderer. Yet what came later was wrong. And James was in favour of what happened next.
(End of Part One).
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