From Guernica to Tehran: Canada and the politics of appeasement

 

On April 26, 1937, German and Italian air forces destroyed the Spanish town of Guernica in what infamously became the first example of an aerial bombing campaign specifically designed to inflict suffering on the civilian population.

Writing for the British newspaper The Times, correspondent George Steer said that “in the form of its execution and the scale of the destruction it wrought […], the raid on Guernica is unparalleled in military history. Guernica was not a military objective. A factory producing war materiel lay outside the town and was untouched. So were two barracks some distance from the town. The town lay far behind the lines. The object of the bombardment was seemingly the demoralization of the civil population and the destruction of the cradle of the Basque race.” [emphasis author’s]

Nearly 89 years later, the city of Tehran, a city 9.7 of million inhabitants, awoke to a sky filled with thick black smoke following the United States bombardment and destruction of four oil storage and distribution sites in the west, north and south of the capital of Iran. CNN correspondent Frederik Pleitgen posted a video on social media on Sunday morning showing the rooftop of his accommodations covered in a slick of oil-soaked rain. Shina Ansari, head of Iran’s Department of Environment, described the resulting catastrophic damage as “ecocide.”

In response to the latest in a series of horrific war crimes and crimes against humanity perpetrated by the United States against Iran, including the sinking of a defenceless Iranian naval vessel returning from an exercise at the invitation of the Indian government, the Canadian government headed by Prime Minister Mark Carney has largely avoided taking a clear position.

In doing so, the Carney government seems intent on continuing the tradition of appeasement that can be traced back to the Nazi bombing of Guernica.

Following that terrible act of destruction and collective punishment, which he almost certainly would have known about, then-Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King met with Adolf Hitler in Berlin, writing in his diary that “[m]y sizing up of the man as I sat and talked with him was that he is really one who truly loves his fellow man and his country […].”

King also had a particularly galling response to the United States atomic bombing of Hiroshima, writing that “It is fortunate that the use of the bomb should have been upon the Japanese rather than upon the white races of Europe.”  (more...)

From Guernica to Tehran: Canada and the politics of appeasement