The Brutal, Tireless Racism
of ‘Stephen Harper Inc.’

We are all like Geronimo's band now,
in the way,
but we lack their cojones!
Guest Column by Robin Mathews   

You are not intended to know….  Start there.  Brainwash from centres like the Fraser Institute; unceasing propaganda from the ‘Stephen Harper Inc.’ organization; cover-up stories from the Mainstream Press and Media; and the refusal of Opposition parties ‘to oppose’ on critical matters keep Canadians from seeing the “Stephen Harper Inc.’ designs to destroy democratic society in Canada.

It keeps them from knowing, in short, that the racism of ‘Stephen Harper Inc.’ is part of a global process to strip communities of democratic government and to replace existing populations, where convenient, with almost robot-human instruments of work. 

Necessary knowledge is denied Canadians because all of the forces named above have committed themselves to the racist strategy – in greater or lesser degree. Consciously or in ignorance.

The key is in the word ‘racism’ and its real meaning, and in the development of its meaning over time. Failure to recognize its essentially imperializing and oppressive nature – regardless of skin colour – will cost all those who choose to remain ignorant. To say that racism is not solely confined to people of different colours is not a contradiction.  It is a clarification. Because the project intending the dehumanization of peoples is not founded essentially upon differences in skin colour.

Skin colour racism exists, of course, but it is almost always built upon a previous process of economic oppression. Nations possessing imperial power are almost always racist of necessity. The brutalization of indigenous populations for economic advantage needs validation. What better validation than the claim that the oppressed are not really human, are a lower order of being, like beasts of burden, animals.

Surprisingly, the word “racism” is fairly new in dictionaries.  That is so despite the fact that the trade in black Africans swung into full operation in the sixteenth century.  The U.S. program of the extermination of native Indians went into operation at least in the eighteenth century.  Smallpox helped the Spaniards decimate the Inca civilization in the sixteenth century, but the destruction of the culture and its records was a program – what we would call a racist program now.

The word “racism” didn’t come into the English language until the nineteenth century, and not early in that century. The removal, the extirpation, the erasure, the decimation of indigenous peoples, however, is not new. It has always proceeded for two reasons.  To gain the natural resource riches upon which a population lives and to gain for settlement the area they occupy. And in slave-owning times - to gain the slaves necessary to build wealth.

When Hitler’s Nazi forces invaded eastward in the 1940s, he considered the Slavic peoples subhuman. That is partly why the slaughter of the Slavs was so intense. Hitler not only despised them, but he wanted their land for settlement. He wanted room for  the German empire to expand, and he wanted the available resource riches that would support expansion of the German population. The Slavs were ‘white’ and the German invaders were ‘white’. That made no difference.  Hitler intended to erase the Slavs.

In the decades since the Second World War the bases upon which racism flourishes have been expanded and strengthened.  Said very briefly, neo-liberalism - which is nothing more than the philosophy of rule by the One Per Cent – has increased its power.  Private corporations have taken over or integrated with governments so the two become increasingly indistinguishable. The One Per Cent has become a global club in which the resources of the planet, its productive organizations, much military might, and the natural environment itself are increasingly directed towards the power and the wealth of the One Per Cent.

In that circumstance – the one we inhabit today – there is not a superior population nor is there a “race” or races considered particularly despicable and inferior.  There are only resources available and obstacles to their exploitation. We are not in the Hobbesian condition of a war of all against all. We are in one  where the One Per Cent is in a war against all others who do not submit to it and join in its program for the planet.

The war is conducted with relentless brainwash, indoctrination, and propaganda cart-wheels.  It’s simplest manifestation is the intensifying claim that (so-called) Free Trade Agreements are undertaken for the good of the people. They are undertaken, rather, (a) to rob national and sub-national governments of sovereign powers, (b) to replace them with private corporate dictate, (c) to provide for an unchallengeable flow of labour across any and all borders, (d) to disable all internal opposition, (e) and to render resident populations impotent against their own pauperization and disenfranchisement.

All who do not submit and join the planetary program are treated as inferiors. They face the increasingly heavy and punitive force of the One Per Cent.  The first to be brutalized and brushed aside are the ‘ridiculous’ indigenous populations who want to hold on to “inefficient”, particularist, and unique social structures on relatively virgin territories. Among them, for instance, are the indigenous victims wrung out and murdered in mining locations across the globe. Or, as in Canada, they are the ones found to be standing in the way of government/foreign corporation plans for pipelines and ocean transportation systems that threaten Native ways of life and territory ... and threaten the health of the whole population.

Then come all the modern structures that stand in the way of the unfettered exploitation of resource wealth by the One Per Cent – unions, provincial powers (in Canada), the courts, structures of social security, democratic constitutions, impediments to the planetary flow of capital, of cheap labour, and of swift product delivery.  The “obstructionist” forces are undermined, attacked, erased (where possible), or transformed into cooperating institutions.

The First Nations peoples in Canada have set up resistance to the Northern Gateway Pipeline and to tanker traffic on the Pacific Coast.  And so ‘Stephen Harper Inc.’ has initiated legislation to strip the First Nations of Canada of fundamental, constitutionally assured powers.

Unions in Canada have fought and are challenging in court so-called temporary migrant laws being used to displace resident Canadians and to undermine living wages in Canada.  And so ‘Stephen Harper Inc.’ is initiating legislation to erase reasonable financial integrity and privacy of unions.

The higher courts are permitting legitimate challenges to perceived attempts by ‘Stephen Harper Inc.’ to destroy the integrity of our hard-won universal suffrage (the right of all to vote for representatives in government). With the twisted judgement by four of seven Supreme Court of Canada judges on the Etobicoke Centre (2011) election challenge, the suspicion is shaping that ‘Stephen Harper Inc.’ has been able to interfere with and influence decisions of the highest Canadian court.

Spokespersons for the general population outside organizations of the indigenous people of Canada have expressed increasing suspicion of “international” agreements to strip Canada of industrial capacity and to unite foreign and (so-called) Canadian corporations in extraction of resources and infrastructure development.  As a result ‘Stephen Harper Inc.’ has openly attacked popular organizations with charitable status.  And it has been elaborating ‘continental’ ties with the U.S. to permit borderless police practice and investigative activities.  And it has been eroding health care structures and other social securities.

Policy of ‘Stephen Harper Inc.’ outside Canada is equally repressive and anti-democratic. In response to reports of Canadian mining operations violating human rights in foreign countries, no legislation is even envisioned.

In response to reports of flagrant abuse offshore of Canadian temporary migrant legislation, no action is taken or foreseen by ‘Stephen Harper Inc’.

In response to offshore tax-haven use by Canadians among the One Per Cent - to the score of billions of dollars, ‘Stephen Harper Inc.’ will not even comment.

As I write, Canada’s governor general is visiting Guatemala, a U.S. sponsored poster-country for internal ‘slave economies’.  Half the population lives below the poverty line.  Her Majesty’s Representative in Canada is being used as an errand-boy and lackey for ‘Stephen Harper Inc.’, discussing “trade, security, and other issues” there.  Johnson should be nowhere near Guatemala.  He is not a diplomat.  He does not represent Stephen Harper or ‘Stephen Harper Inc.’ Remember he is alleged to have received the position of governor general for his odious role in preventing Justice Jeffrey Oliphant from pursuing the facts in the (2009) Brian Mulroney/Karlheinz Schreiber/Airbus bribery scandal.

In response to the Palestinian authority’s move at the United nations to provide some correction of the status of the Palestinian people – with especial reference to the Gaza Strip – “Stephen Harper Inc.’ responded with absurd and melodramatic posturing on behalf of continued oppression and brutality.

More and more of the world sees the Gaza Strip as “the world’s largest open-air Concentration Camp.”

Even the English right-leaning Economist writes (Nov. 27.12) of Israel leaving the Palestinians “ever-shrinking patches of parched land, sealing their borders, crippling their economy, stunting their political aspirations, jailing or killing their heroes, and blasting apart whatever chance they might have had at a prosperous well-governed state….” But ‘Stephen Harper Inc.’ sent the sycophant bully John Baird to the United Nations to announce ‘Loud and Clear’ that the manipulators of Canadian policy back the most famous, continuous, unrelenting repressive action in the world.

Astonishing.  Except the treatment of the Palestinians is in complete accord with a murderous One Per Cent securing large territories as resource and geopolitically secure areas. With the absurd and ghoulish position taken by John Baird for all the world to stare at in astonishment, Canadians, it might seem, don’t need any other example as evidence that ‘Stephen Harper Inc.’ is a racist operation, brutal, tireless … and morally repugnant.