Left JAB at Canada

John Bell has been writing regularly for Socialist Worker and Socialist.ca since 1980. Today the champions of Canada’s 1% in parliament and the provincial legislatures will proudly defend a nation founded and sustained on genocide, climate crimes and exploitation. For forty years, John has taken on our elites and the craven politicians who serve them. As an antidote to the official celebrations, today we present to you a baker’s dozen of his articles tearing down the sanctity of our national mythology.

War
Let’s start with “the good war.” John takes on the official glorification of war and recounts how his Dad, “hated Remembrance Day – all he wanted to do, what he was never able to do, was forget. I vividly remember him saying, “If we really cared about veterans we wouldn’t make the poor old bastards go out and beg.” War and remembrance

John vs. “In Flanders Fields.” Poems and propaganda

Genocide
While the mainstream media was wringing its collective hands about whether or not we should use the term genocide to describe missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, John wrote, “The obstruction by the state police is evidence that genocidal practices are not a thing of the past, but bred in the bone of the colonial Canadian state.” Canada’s Genocide

John takes on Harper’s hype around the doomed Franklin expedition. Here he connects the imperial arrogance of the sailors who died rather than accept help from Indigenous people to today’s rush to exploit the North to Harper’s denial of the need for action to prevent more missing and murdered Indigenous women. Franklin my dear, I don’t give a damn

Last year on July 1, he wrote that, “on both sides of the border the chickens of imperialism are coming home to roost. Both Canada and the US are national enterprises based on conquest, slaughter and enslavement. Both nations are flailing about as their domestic economies devolve into shell games of speculation and environmental self-destruction.” Canada Day: The real enemy is at home

As actions in solidarity with the Wet’suwet’en spread, John wrote that “A debate is raging in our media: is Canada ‘broken’. Spoiler alert, it was never not broken.” Reaping the whirlwind: Canadian ruling class author of its own misfortune

John Bell - Socialist writer for 40 years

Racism
Last year while the middle right was rushing to embrace the far right, John wrote about not only the “need to expose the convoy for its explicit racism, “ but also the urgency of exposing “the implicit racism of pipeline construction for Indigenous communities and of climate chaos for the global south . . . we have to debunk the false debate that pits the environment against jobs: instead of pipelines, we need to win the argument with working people that a better economy is possible.” Yellow vests, brown shirts: convoy runs out of fuel

Just a few weeks ago John wrote, “racism and police violence are not problems unique to the USA. In the last week three Canadians have died when police were called to look after their welfare. Two were Black, one was Indigenous.” Here he presents the need to Demilitarize, Dismantle, Defund the police

Son of Trudeau
Just after Trudeau’s election win, John looked back to previous Liberal governments to predict the shortcomings of this one. From Pierre to Justin Trudeau: challenging corporate Canada

“While the docile media swooned over our shirtless Prime Minister,” John was writing about how Trudeau’s “ government was quietly endorsing changes to the export rules that prohibited arms trade with dictatorships and human rights abusers.” Canada’s killer elite

During the last election John looked at how Trudeau's blackface pictures relate to the widespread racism in the Liberal and Conservatives parties and all through Canadian society. Blackface reaction reveals Canada’s racist core

Lest you think John can only see the half-empty side of Trudeau, here he points out that Trudeau looks good standing beside Trump. Trumping Trudeau

A better world
In 2018, John was the recipient of a double lung transplant and he wrote about world history, his lungs and capitalism, “I cannot be unaware of the sweat and blood of those that produced the wealth that resulted in the “miracle” of my care and treatment. It is not guilt I am talking about here, but my responsibility to look beyond the surface of this system, to find and expose its essence. And doing that, committing myself to fighting for change.” World history meets my lungs

Stay tuned to this website. As federal and provincial politicians bow and scrape before the 1%, and try to make us pay for their continuing crises, John will be here to expose them all.