Harper's Conservatives Follow, in Lock-Step, the US Right Wing's Dirty Playbook

The following article by David Myers in today's Vancouver Sun is definitely worth your time to read:

"There is a disturbing trend going on amongst Canadian right wing proponents including the Harper government. They are attempting to copy US right-wing methods in Canada in lock-step formation. These methods include trying to establish a national right-wing media like FOX “News” that purports to be an unbiased factual based news media, but is in fact the propaganda tool of a right-wing political movement and its chosen party (the Republicans in the US and the Conservative in Canada).

Now, here in Canada, the Conservative government of Steven Harper is trying to use the power of government to control and manipulate the free flowing distribution of scientific information. (See 'Tightened Muzzle on Scientists Is Orwellian' in the Vancouver Sun, page B2, Monday September 13, 2010).

In the US, established right-wing religion and their political allies (the Republicans and the Tea Party) have been engaging in a powerful campaign of denial of science-based investigations including denial of evolution and of the global climate change threat. Their right-wing fundamentalist-based movement continues to try to convince Americans that evolution is only an unproven opinion, less valid than their own religion based alternative – creationism. They have even demanded equal time in classrooms to teach creationism as an alternative to evolution. During the Bush administration Republicans also attempted to impose control over what government officials and scientists could say to the public about scientific information, requiring prior approval of public statements by government funded scientists by Republican political appointees. Now the Harper government is following suit.

What is becoming obvious is that the fundamentalist fascist right-wing is using exactly the same unethical tactics in both the US and Canada. This looks like a new trend but if you examine a number of other cases in which the vested interests in both the US and Canada has cooperated to achieve their nefarious ends, it becomes all the more obvious and alarming. Two examples come to mind: the US “war on drugs” (particularly marijuana) has been imposed on the US ever since Richard Nixon was president, creating a prison-industrial complex complete with its set of vested interests (including organized crime) which benefit and profit immensely from creating the biggest prison system in the world. Canada has been pressured and threatened by the US during this long, expensive, and unsuccessful war on drugs against legalizing drugs in this country. In addition, the Bush administration’s Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), conspired with Canada’s Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) to extradite Canadian citizen Mark Emery to face charges in the US, in spite of the fact that he had never been charged with a similar crime in Canada. This is particularly significant when viewed in conjunction with the second example, the RCMP’s cooperation with the US CIA’s efforts to topple the Pearson administration in Canada in 1963. (See “RCMP Report Identifies Coup D’etat as Threat” on the same page of the same issue of the Vancouver Sun – p.B2, Monday, September 13, 2010.) This article documents the efforts of CIA counter-intelligence branch head, James Jesus Angleton to engineer the overthrow of the government of Canadian Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson, because Angleton believed that Pearson “was an agent for Russian intelligence” because of Pearson’s “independent stands in foreign policy, his grain trades with the Soviet Union, his antiwar positions on Vietnam, and especially his friendly stance on Cuba.” “To get at Pearson, the CIA set its sights first on Canadian diplomat James Watkins, Canada’s ambassador to Russia in the mid-1950’s and a friend of the prime minister. After 27 days of interrogation by the Mounties, the 62-year old Watkins’s troubled heart gave out and he died, apparently without supplying the confession the spymasters hoped could bring down the (Canadian) government.”

Angleton is considered, among conspiracy buffs, as one of the CIA’s suspected conspirators in the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy for, among other things, wanting to end the US involvement in Viet Nam, stating that he was going to “break the CIA into a thousand pieces, and scatter it to the winds”, opening up new overtures to the Fidel Castro regime in Cuba, bringing about a cessation of the cold war with Russia, focusing on a world movement to end pollution of the planet’s environment, and waging a war on organized crime.

It is time for the good citizens of Canada to wake up and look at the disturbing trends of the Canadian Conservative Party under Stephen Harper and his right wing allies in both Canada and the US to subvert science and democracy. We have to stand up for our rights and our democracy or the powerful vested interests will take them away."

Daid Myers
Vancouver Sun