Speech at Anti-NATO Rally, Hamilton, as Part of Canada-Wide Day of Action

Speech at Anti-NATO Rally, Hamilton, as Part of Canada-Wide Day of Action

Saleh Waziruddin, St. Catharines (not delivered in person)

Thank you for inviting me to speak here, I come from St. Catharines in Niagara.

Through NATO and imperialism in general we are at the edge of yet another world war. Just before the previous two world wars many people thought the massive outbreak of senseless slaughter was impossible, but it happened before they realized it.

The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, an organization founded by Albert Einstein and Robert Oppenheimer, head of the Manhattan Project, who keep track of how close we are to mutual annihilation with a doomsday clock, say we are “100 seconds to midnight”, and “the doorstep of doom is no place to loiter.”

World War II was far worse than World War I, and World War III promises to be even worse yet. If we are to do our part we need to get Canada out of NATO, out of the tangle of imperialist alliances that have hurtled us into war before and will do again.

The parliamentary budget officer, Yves Giroux, forecasts Canada's military budget will increase by nearly $15 billion in the next four years, in part to catch up to the reckless pledge to NATO to waste 2% of the GDP on instruments of death and destruction. We need to get our municipal, provincial, and federal representatives to demand this be rolled back so we can spend instead on our basic social needs in this time of inflation and pandemic.

I want to alert you that shamefully from Niagara there is a motion circulating to Ontario municipalities for elected officials to “voluntary” sanction themselves from Russia, even if they had never intended to travel to Russia in their life. This is a meaningless dramatic performance which does no good for anyone and only needlessly escalates the environment for more war. I urge everyone to oppose this resolution when it gets to your municipal government, work with everyone you can find to stop this heightening of dangerous tensions.

It's also important to work with the Association of United Ukrainian Canadians (AUUC), a progressive organization with a long history in Canada, including in Welland in Niagara. The AUUC is calling for a comprehensive ceasefire, saying “War is the basest form of political contention. It is a breakdown of the fraternal unity of peoples.”

It is very important to keep demonstrating against NATO and war, and to bring more and more people in even though there is a lot of pressure on us to be silent and concede to militarism and yet more war.