Canada is not that clean peace loving country you thought it was ?

Thought Canada wasn’t in Iraq ? We’re #5 of all the countries occupying there!

Just check out The Black Book of Canadian Foreign PolicyYves Engler

This book could change how you see Canada. Most of us believe this country’s primary role has been as peacekeeper or honest broker in difficult-to-solve disputes. But, contrary to the mythology of Canada as a force for good in the world, The Black Book of Canadian Foreign Policy sheds light on many dark corners: from troops that joined the British in Sudan in 1885 to gunboat diplomacy in the Caribbean and aspirations of Central American empire, to participation in the U.N. mission that killed Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, to important support for apartheid South Africa, Zionism and the U.S. war in Vietnam, to helping overthrow Salvador Allende and supporting the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile, to Haiti, Iraq and Afghanistan today.

“We bear responsibility for what governments do in the world, primarily our own, but secondarily those we can influence, our allies in particular. Yves Engler’s penetrating inquiry yields a rich trove of valuable evidence about Canada’s role in the world, and poses a challenge for citizens who are willing to take their fundamental responsibilities seriously.” —Noam Chomsky

“Engler has done for Canadian foreign policy what I tried to do for United States foreign policy in my book Killing Hope — cover each region of the world, showing how ‘peaceful, benevolent, altruistic Canada’ has, on numerous occasions, served as an integral part of Western imperialism, particularly the American version, helping to keep the third World down and in its place.” —William Blum, author of Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II



About the Author

Former Vice President of the Concordia Student Union, Yves Engler is a Montréal activist and author. He has published three books, The Black Book of Canadian Foreign Policy, Playing Left Wing: From Rink Rat to Student Radical and (with Anthony Fenton)Canada in Haiti: Waging War on The Poor Majority

Reviews

Canada not the peacekeeper many have been led to believe

Canada carefully cultivates its “peacekeeper” image. But in reality, an independent journalist maintains, this nation has been implicated in brutal events in many parts of the world. And Canada’s politicians, says Yves Engler, have succeeded in covering up most of those covert activities. The Montreal-based writer spoke at the University of Lethbridge as part of a cross-Canada book tour. Even Lester Pearson — though he won a Nobel Peace Prize — was much more interested in maintaining European control of the Suez Canal than protecting citizens of Egypt, Engler said. Canada has been involved in a series of less peaceable actions in the years since, he said during a session organized by the Lethbridge Public Interest Research Group.

Yet many Canadians still believe their army leads peace-making efforts, he said, and even more have no real knowledge of Canada’s foreign policies. That’s why Engler wrote “The Black Book of Canadian Foreign Policy,” released last month.

His goal, he explains, “is to reveal a side of international relations that our government and corporations have kept hidden from the vast majority of us.”

Regardless of whether they’re aware of what their government or their armed forces are doing in countries around the world, Engler says all Canadians are complicit in those events.
“Every year tens of billions of our tax dollars are spent on the military, on foreign aid and other forms of diplomacy,” he points out. “We ignore foreign affairs at our peril.”

But others may be in much worse peril, he warns. There were about 8,000 murders in Haiti, he says, after Canadian and American troops deposed elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 2004.

Canada also supported South Africa’s apartheid policies for many years, he points out — with this nation’s ways of marginalizing its First Nations peoples widely cited as the model. And even today, Engler says Canada’s foreign aid dollars are used to rewrite safety codes to benefit Canadian companies mining in those lands.

“Our politicians are lying to us” when they’re faced with some of this information, he claims.
The Canadian public doesn’t pay much attention to overseas incursions, he notes, and their news media doesn’t spend much time digging into those issues, either. So he’s not surprised to find university students among the uninformed.

“For the most part, people have been taken aback,” Engler says, describing response to his appearances across Canada. “Even people who think they know about foreign affairs.”
The book, he says, is offered “in the spirit of democratic accountability.” Engler is hoping to hear differing views once knowledgeable Canadians — like military historian David Bercuson at the University of Calgary — have an opportunity to read it and reflect.

Americans may be better informed on their nation’s foreign adventures, he says, partly because their freedom of information laws are more powerful than ours. As well, many Americans support their government and their armed forces when officials cite their “responsibility to protect” policy as justification for taking over a “failed state.”

In Canada, elected officials believe citizens still see their military as peacekeepers in green berets.
“Maybe they wouldn’t lie to us if they didn’t think they needed to.”


Written by Dave Mabell