MY CBC COMMENTARY
CBC Radio One
Commentary Thursday, 30-Jan-2003 19:21:31 EST
Transcript:
If There's War in
Iraq What About The Children?
Introduction:
President Bush
left no doubt in his State of the Union address that the U-S will attack Iraq if
Saddam Hussein does not disarm. That attack may be only weeks away. Wilma van
der Veen is a sociologist at St Mary's University and an activist. On Commentary
she says we should be talking about the moral issues of such a war.
The United States and the rest of the world had two choices after September 11th: the path of revenge or the path of enlightenment. Of course there wasn’t even a debate and we are in no doubt about which path we are being lead down now - brainwashed into thinking a war with Iraq is of the essence and unstoppable.
Well I say no – there are alternatives, although today they seem like shadows washed out in the blazing glare of revenge. I'm talking about Nonviolence. Remember Gandhi and Martin Luther King?
Here we lie at an important juncture in history - we've been here many times before - where the path of war and violence has all too often been chosen, where war has all too often lead to conflict and death without any real attempt to solve the underlying problems.
We Canadians already have the blood of thousands of Iraqi children on our hands because of our government’s role and hence our own complicity in the decade old sanctions. Now some of us are arguing that we must go in and take out Saddam Hussein - more children will just be "collateral damage". I say no. The megalomania of political leadership is evident, in anyone who chooses violence to solve problems.
If we join a war in Iraq we will be sending Canadian soldiers to do our dirty work for oil and for furthering US world domination. It is time for Canadians to wake up and to see how the terrorist within us is being used for profit, how our fears are being exploited.
We need to acknowledge our own responsibility and become warriors of nonviolence. We must refuse to support and cooperate with any type of violence our government undertakes.
Nonviolence requires us to act out of compassion and throughout history that has meant engaging in acts of civil disobedience. As Howard Zinn states, professor emeritus of history, Civil disobedience is not our problem. Civil obedience is. People all over the world have obeyed the dictates of their leaders and have gone to war, and millions have been killed. People have been obedient all over the world in the face of poverty and starvation, stupidity, war, and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves, and the grand thieves are running and robbing the country."
For those of who you may be rolling your eyes thinking how naïve I am, I look to history to the thousands of examples of Nonviolence at work: religious groups standing up to persecution, the collapse of the Berlin wall, ending apartheid, the women’s movement and the civil right’s movement. There are practical alternatives to violence. Canadians should explore them.
For Commentary, I'm Wilma van der Veen in Halifax.
www.cbc.ca/commentary
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