“ It is clear that such a major campaign against Germany’s peace and security cannot go unanswered. World propaganda against us will be answered with world propaganda for us.” – Joseph Goebbels [1]

“I just think that what I’d like people to understand is that so many of the things that as Canadians we’d like to think are sacrosanct, you know, whether it’s we live in a democratic society, we have a free and open media, we have academic institutions, like you said, Michael, that are these open spaces of knowledge exchange, all of these things are being severely eroded, seriously eroded. And I think that really what, you know, if Canadians don’t wake up pretty soon, you know, that democracy is going to slip through our hands, like grains of sand, you know, because it really is getting that intense.” – Kevin MacKay, from this week’s interview.

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In her 2007 book The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot,  Naomi Wolf wrote about how the “blueprint” for crushing a democracy always took the form of ten steps:

Invoking an external and internal threat

Establish secret prisons

Develop a paramilitary force

Surveil ordinary citizens

Infiltrate citizen groups

Arbitrarily detain and release citizens

Target key individuals

Restrict the press

Cast criticism as ‘espionage’ and dissent as ‘treason’

Subvert the rule of law [2]

It is shocking to reflect on how many of these steps have been taken in many countries. And not just in places like Ukraine and Israel, as spelled out throughout this website. Canada, too, is not the crusader for democracy it bills itself to be. Several past guests of the Global Research News Hour have experiences with the majority of these repressive measures. And this is a situation that should concern all of us.[3]

We have rocket high inflation, largely due to the war in Ukraine (NATO vs Russia). We have enemies (Russia and Palestine supporters). And increasingly, the “pawns” they set up in academia and in journalism are contributing “dis-information” to stir up harmful dissent in our conversations about war torn regions on the globe.[4]

We are now witnessing innocent people, from independent journalists to intellectuals of high esteem facing open challenges in the public sphere. In Canada, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) have put their women and men on notice to set their sites on any “person of interest” that could pose a threat. And far too many are being detained. [5]

Germany was a democratic society just a few years before suspicion and despair drove it toward a constitutional abyss. If Canada has begun to follow the same path then the subject deserves a fair hearing on the Global Research News Hour. [6]

Our show starts with two women, Eva Bartlett and Tamara Lorincz, who got detained in Canadian airports and asked unusual questions for daring to – gulp – speak with Russians! Later in the program, we hear from three more people: Professor Radhika Desai, Professor Kevin MacKay, and independent journalist Vanessa Beeley about similar encounters in airports and in academia more generally. These individuals through what they experienced tell us more about what happened, how much worse this could get, and what can be done about it.

Eva Bartlett is a Canadian independent journalist and activist. She has spent years on the ground covering conflict zones in the Middle East, especially in Syria and occupied Palestine. She is a recipient of the 2017 International Journalism Award for International Reporting, granted by the Mexican Journalists’ Press Club, was the first recipient of the Serena Shim Award for Uncompromised Integrity in Journalism, and was short-listed in 2017 for the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism.

Tamara Lorincz is a member of Canadian Voice of Women for Peace. Tamara is also a member of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom-Canada, and a fellow with the Canadian Foreign Policy Institute. As well, she is on the advisory committee of the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space, World Beyond War and the No to War, No to NATO Network. She is a PhD candidate, Balsillie School of International Affairs, Wilfrid Laurier University.

Radhika Desai is  Professor in the Department of Political Studies at the University of Manitoba in Canada; and she is the Convener of the International Manifesto Group. She is the author of Geopolitical Economy: After US Hegemony, Globalization and Empire (2013) among other books, as well as numerous articles in Economic and Political Weekly, International Critical Thought, New Left Review, Third World Quarterly, World Review of Political Economy and other journals.

Kevin MacKay is Anthropology professor at Mohawk College of Applied Arts and Technology, and also the  Co-op Executive Director of Skydragon cooperative,  a non-profit community development organization in Hamilton, Ontario. He also coordinates a new group: Canadian Academics for a Just Foreign Policy (justforeignpolicy.ca)

Vanessa Beeley is an independent journalist and photographer who has worked extensively in the Middle East – on the ground in Syria, Egypt, Iraq and Palestine, while also covering the conflict in Yemen since 2015. In 2017 Vanessa was a finalist for the prestigious Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism which was won by the much-acclaimed Robert Parry that year. In 2019, Vanessa was among recipients of the Serena Shim Award for uncompromised integrity in journalism. 

(Global Research News Hour episode 445)

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Transcript of interview with Tamara Lorincz and Eva Bartlett, October 16, 2024

Global Research: I will start with Professor MacKay. Could you comment a little on the experiences that you have endured and witnessed in the last year or so?

Kevin MacKay: Thank you.

Yeah, I think like a lot of other folks in academia who are studying critical foreign policy, so they’re looking at world events from a lens that is critical of Western interests, you know, Western colonialism, imperialism. We’ve all been, I think, experiencing a chill and pushback in various ways. At my institution, it has, there’s been a couple of campaigns to get me fired.

I seem to have very, very poor luck using space on campus to hold any kind of critical event. And I’m trying to use legal means to push against that. So definitely been experiencing a lot of suppression, and then also encountering other folks who have been as well.

And so I really think this is a national phenomenon that we’re witnessing.

GR: Yeah, yeah. I mean, I guess, especially with the, what’s happening on campuses with students who are trying to embargo the against, you know, starting the embargoes against the Palestine, the genocide of Palestinians.

KM: Yeah, very much so. So we’ve seen it among students and faculty, you’re right, there’s really a concerted effort to crack down on any alternative narratives.

And I think it speaks a lot to you, as I’m sure other guests will speak to the importance of establishment narratives in enabling things like the Palestinian genocide, enabling the proxy war in Ukraine. I think that, you know, obviously, our governments, the military industrial complex, the other power centers, the only way they can do what they do is if there is, you know, profound misinformation and really skewed narratives out there in the public. And I think folks who are trying to push against that, you know, such as Vanessa, Radhika, you know, myself, other academics are becoming targets simply because they can’t let the truth come out.

GR: Okay. Radhika Desai, I know that you travel pretty frequently as part of your job. You know, you’ve been to China many times, Russia, you’ve been, you know, all over the place.

And you actually asked some of the guests to come here, convene them in conferences, have them speak to your students and so on. Yet, something happened to you recently that’s, as I understand, it’s never happened before. And, you know, maybe you could enlighten us on what exactly happened.

It was at an airport, correct?

Radhika Desai: Yeah. So, I just want to say that actually, the history of trying to suppress the alternative, you know, suppress the truthful narratives that, at least the diverse views that we must put forward in order to have any proper debate, the suppression of that, for me, in my personal experience goes back a long way. I remember in 2014, when essentially Russia incorporated Crimea into its own territory.

And Boris Kagarlitsky, who you will know, is at the moment under arrest in Russia. At that time, he had held a conference. He’s a good friend of mine and my husband, Alan Freeman.

And he had invited us to a conference in Yalta, in the Crimea. We had gone there. It was a conference of activists.

As you know, when the original civil war started, there was a, you know, these people called them, they saw themselves as establishing these people’s republics and so on. And so, we had gone there and there was another Canadian there, Roger Annis. And when we all came back, we decided to hold an event just to report on what we had done, because we had been talking to all the activists, the Odessa massacre had just taken place.

So, there were activists from all over essentially reporting on what had happened. And we, after coming back, we held a public meeting at the Ukrainian Labour Temple, which is a very well-known and beautiful venue here in Winnipeg. And we had essentially people who were also academics at the same university, but also their community allies tried to disrupt our meeting.

A year or two later, we had an event on NATO. There were attempts to disrupt it. Every so often, there are people writing to my head of department or my dean saying this woman should not be working here, et cetera.

But so far, thanks to the University of Manitoba, they have taken the position that Radhika has, as like all faculty members, has academic freedom. And I have written about Ukraine. I have edited a book about it.

So, it’s not like I’m, you know, mouthing off about things I know nothing about. Then, yes, you were mentioning, so this was already in the background. And then last year, we were going to Valdai.

It’s essentially Russia’s equivalent of the Council on Foreign Relations. If the Council on Foreign Relations of a big and important country invites you, you want to go because there are really interesting people there. And by the way, I should mention that the guests at Valdai don’t just include, you know, sort of people from countries that are not Western.

They include a lot of Western countries. There are people from France, from Germany, from the UK, from Italy, from all over Western Europe, et cetera. But anyway, so we were there.

And before we got there, we actually were in China for a few days for a conference. And then we were going from China to Sochi and back and then back from China to Winnipeg. And so, while we were in China, we heard that Valdai had been sanctioned by the Canadian government.

This immediately raised the question, should we go or not? Alan and I sat and we read the sanctions, like the law of the sanctions. We consulted informally, of course, a lot of friends, knowledgeable friends, including friends who were lawyers. And we decided on balance that the sanctions did not apply to us.

We went. We returned. We spent a couple more days in China before returning via Vancouver to Canada and to Winnipeg.

And at Vancouver Airport, we were subject, Alan and I were subject to a three hours long interrogation in which the customs officers were essentially on a fishing expedition saying things like, you know, Valdai has been sanctioned. Why did you go to Valdai? Who did you meet? Blah, blah, and so on. And initially, we thought, you know, we should cooperate.

We can tell them everything that we do, et cetera. So, we cooperated. But they kept pushing and being really aggressive and often insulting and all that.

So, then finally, we decided, OK, we’re not going to, you know, this is it. So, I said, you know, you keep saying that Valdai has been sanctioned, but I have read the sanctions law. It does not apply to attending conference.

Have you read the sanctions law? This guy says, oh, there are two people there. O h, we don’t know anything about sanctions. We’re just customs officers.

I said, right. So, I’m answering every last question you got about what is on my person, what’s in my bags. And I let you do your job as a customs officer, but I’m not answering a single other question about Valdai or anything that that’s none of your business.

So, then they tried to, they goaded me for another 15 minutes because they finished with Alan by this time. They goaded me for another 15 minutes and then they gave up because I refused. I literally just stood there like this and I did not answer any question.

They would do stupid things like don’t put your hands in your pockets. Like, where have you heard that? You know, they just do anything to try to intimidate you, to discombobulate you, to make you feel like you are very insecure and you really have to fight back. But they were just on a fishing expedition.

They got nothing. And I am going to Valdai again this year and I will see what they do when I come back.

GR: Vanessa Beeley, you were confronted at Heathrow Airport almost three years ago, I believe. And I mean, you live in Damascus now, but you travelled to different centres from time to time.

I noticed that you’ve really undercut Western state narratives, particularly with regard to the White Helmets in Syria, right? And maybe you may have run into difficulties, just for that, with getting into the United States and Canada. But as I understand it, it’s nothing like what you went through at Heathrow Airport. And does it sound, what Radhika went through, does that sound similar to what you went through?

Vanessa Beeley: Yeah, very similar.

But I mean, if you remember when I did the speaking tour in Canada, I think that was 20, no, it was 2018 or 2019. I’m losing track. But if you remember, every single talk was boycotted and shut down.

And we had to, in every city, find a last minute venue to do the talk. I mean, it was just extraordinary. And even in Winnipeg, by the way, I can’t remember the university that stopped it, but crazy.

But anyway, so I came to live in Syria in 2019. And then of course, COVID hit and everyone was kind of pretty much isolated, couldn’t go anywhere. And then I think it was at the end of 2022, I decided I would go back.

My brother had had his first baby, so I wanted to go back for Christmas. And I’ll never forget, so it was a flight coming in from Beirut. I’m probably the only British person on this flight.

And I get off the plane and there’s two plainclothes policemen standing there, one woman, one guy. And they basically presented themselves as the anti-terrorist squad. They demanded my passport, my mobile phone.

And I remember that my first statement to them was, why are you arresting me? Why aren’t you arresting the British government? They’re responsible for the terrorism in Syria. I was so angry. I was so incensed, you know, that-

GR: You were like Radhika, you stood your ground.

VB: Yeah, absolutely. And I refused to give the mobile phone. So they said, okay, if you don’t, we’ll arrest you.

So I had to hand it over.

GR: You’re a journalist too.

VB: Yeah! So it was Section 7 of the Anti-Terrorist act which is effectively, as Radhika mentioned, it’s a fishing expedition, right? And I was held for six hours, which is the maximum amount of time that they can hold you under this particular section.

There is now another section that they’re bringing into use where they can effectively arrest people without charging them and hold them like Richard Medhurst and Sarah Wilkinson in the UK for their anti-genocide views. I’m not even going to say pro-Palestinian because, you know, any human being should be against what Israel is doing to the Palestinians and now to the Lebanese. And of course, for many years against Syria also.

And so I was interrogated for this six hours. I had my DNA taken. I had my fingerprints taken.

I was photographed like a criminal, you know, with your face against the wall and you have to turn sideways. So it was a total criminalization process. It was a total intimidation harassment process.

And the thing is, at the end of it, because I had also undergone very much like  Eva Bartlett, two years of solid media pressure and attacks, not only media, but also from academic institutions where I was, you know, going to speak and so on. But I found out at the end of the interview, so at the end of the six hours, that effectively the BBC had given the information to the terrorist squad. Why did I know this? Because of the questions that were being asked were related to a sting operation that was carried out against an academic that was part of the working group investigating the OPCW corruption and misreporting of the alleged chemical weapon attacks in Syria, particularly in 2018 in Douma in the eastern suburbs of Damascus.

So it became very clear to me then that media outlets like the BBC and The Guardian and Channel 4 and all of these outlets that had been attacking me for two years were working in lockstep with the security agencies in the UK who were then triggering the anti-terrorist police. And I wasn’t investigated, by the way, about my Syria work so much, although that was a major part of the conversation, I was stopped on the basis that I was giving secret information to foreign intelligence agencies, primarily Russia. So, you know, it was ridiculous.

And to a degree, you know, I was pretty relaxed. I didn’t have anything to hide. Everything I say is in the public domain anyway.

And at the end of six hours, they did give me back my phone, which many people didn’t have that advantage.

GR: So, I mean, it’s not as if they actually believe necessarily that you are this terrible person, that they’re, as you say, a fishing expedition and they’re trying to, you know, get whatever they can and to intimidate you and to avoid covering these things.

VB: Well, and to download everything from my phone, everything.

So, all my emails, it took them six hours to take all that information and I still don’t know where it is. I don’t know who’s received this information, what it’s being used for, what my DNA is going to be used for. Is it going to be stored? Is it going to be, you know, used as some kind of data mining service in the future? I have no idea.

There’s been no responses from them since the interrogation.

GR: Yeah. Well, Radhika and Vanessa, I mean, did you take any action, like in protest, like go to a political individual or anyone who could say, hey, you got to do something about this?

RD: Well, I mean, I’ve just been so darn busy this past year, partly, of course, because of these things, because Vanessa mentioned something which I should also mention, which is that, of course, when I came back, literally, like, as some of you know, part of the reason why I was interrogated, apart from going to the Valdai conference, is that I embarrassed the Canadian government because we were asked, you know, in the past, we used to be able to just ask questions from the floor to President Putin.

Valdai always closes with a big address by President Putin. That’s like one of the big events on the foreign policy calendar in Russia. And so in the past, we used to just get up on the floor from the floor and ask questions.

But lately, they have said, please submit questions. So I had submitted a question about the fact that and this is an appropriate question to ask the president of the country that played such a big role in defeating Nazism, because the Canadian parliament has stood up and applauded a Nazi on the grounds that he had been fighting the communists. And I just find it to this day astonishing that hundreds, how many MPs do we have 400 and something?

GR: 338, I think.

RD: Yeah, three or whatever. I think the senators were there too. But whatever.

The point is that the entire parliament, hundreds of parliamentarians can stand up and applaud this guy without asking a very simple question. If he was fighting the Russians in World War Two, who was he fighting with?

GR: Yeah.

RD: They never asked that question. How? And I saw, you know, of course, that I got so the moment I saw, I asked this question.

And incidentally, I also asked a question about Boris Kagarlitsky. So I asked these two questions, because Boris is a friend, although, you know, on the war, he has taken a position that I do not agree with. But I still think he’s a great scholar and important intellectual.

Anyway, I asked President Putin about this. And in fact, Boris was, as a result, released for a while. Anyway, the point is that I asked this question.

And of course, Putin began, you know, took his time elaborating an answer, because, of course, as is his right as the leader of this country. And so, you know, he, so he did this, and the meeting hadn’t even ended.

a 

a 
And my phone was bleeping with, you know, CBC wants to interview, blah, blah, etc.

And I took the interview. And that told me taught me one lesson, never do an interview unless they let you record it, because they so misrepresent what you’ve said. And they just take little clips, you know, and they remove and I would have loved to put a recording of that interview on my own website and said, please listen to this here.

But anyway, so I just wanted to and then I got a bad out, you know, the local CBC people came and interviewed me and did the same hash job, and so on. So, all of that has happened. And I should mention just one quick other thing.

And now I’m, you know, so I’ve just been so busy. And I have so much writing to do that I haven’t bothered to do anything, although I have made notes. And I had for a while thought I would write a thing on sanctions, because there is something really, really problematic about sanctions too, because these sanctions are written in such a way that they will allow most businessmen to continue their operations with Russia and with Russian businesses.

They are actually written in a way that they can be used to harass people like me not to actually obstruct business between Canada and Russia, which is what their proclaimed goal is. So, I was going to write an article about that. That didn’t get done because of too many other things.

But lately, there has been an article in The Hill Times about people who appear on RT and attend Valdai Club conferences. There is actually a handful of us in this country who fit that definition. And Dimitri Lascaris, who you know, and Alan and I, we certainly have written a joint letter to The Hill Times.

We are told it’s going to be published soon. So, I hope they will publish it either this week or next. And I should also add that Vanessa’s experience with what is the venue being cancelled and finding a new secret venue each time.

This happened when Dimitri was doing a tour, touring all over the country and reporting on his trip to Ukraine and to Crimea. Sorry, to Russia and to Crimea. So, anyway, I mean, these things are happening.

And I would say, of course, now, at Kevin’s instigation, Kevin has taken the initiative, an excellent initiative to start this Canadian Academics for Just Foreign Policy. So, I’ll let him talk about that. But this is the rubric under which we should fight.

GR: Kevin McKay, you know, the university has been such a, I don’t know, a sanctuary, in a sense, you know, I mean, you know, certain perspectives like communism or LGBTQ in the past, they could be spoken here before anywhere else, really. This is where it started as a sanctionary.

And what’s more, you have Tenure. And so, it protects you, you know, to explore new frontiers of thought, you know, kind of unmolested, but now we seem to see we’re seeing where things are no longer safe. Talk about, you know, going forward, where were the these things that are they’re affecting a faculty and in students, is there a noticeable change in the way they’re studying and or behaving or working that that you’re noticing?

KM: Yeah, thank you.

I mean, you know, I wasn’t around as an academic in the 60s. But from what I understand from folks who were, we’ve had, we’ve had waves of this kind of suppression, right? We’ve had, you know, obviously, sort of the McCarthy era in the States, we had, you know, our equivalent in Canada, as well, where at different times, academics have been suppressed, it always seems to be when the empire is waging major wars. I mean, when Canada was occupying Afghanistan, it was incredibly difficult to have any kind of discourse about Afghanistan within academia.

So, I think that’s the suppression has always been there. But I think we see, I mean, recently, it seems to me, anyway, that it’s been given this new sort of unholy energy, right, by, you know, the conflict in Palestine, the genocide there, by the Ukraine proxy war, there’s a real, it’s more blatant, I would say, it’s more out in the open, in the sense that you have faculty members whose employment is being threatened, you have a lot of internal chilling, you know, that I know, Radhika, when we did our launch last week, spoke really, really eloquently about just all the subtle ways in which, whether it’s getting grants, whether it’s getting publications, whether it’s participating on committees, you know, doing acts of service within the institution as professors are supposed to do. There’s so many ways in which people can be marginalized, and they’re doing it to students as well.

So, we had an amazing graduate student speaking at our launch last week, and it was a really heartbreaking story. She was talking about just all the ways in which she is being systematically marginalized, whether it’s her thesis committee, whether it’s constant investigations that the institution is conducting into her behaviour. And the thing is, too, there’s the weaponization of codes of conduct that we’re seeing now across academia.

And so, we all have these kind of codes of conduct or civility policies or anti-harassment policies, and it sounds great on a certain level, you know, if you’re going to storm into someone’s office and tell them off, well, we don’t want that, right? But what they’re being used to do is to suppress speech, to threaten, to intimidate and harass faculty who are speaking out against genocide, speaking out against proxy war, and even just speaking for peace. And this is what, to me, what is really interesting is just advocating for a peaceful foreign policy, advocating for things like international law and global cooperation. These things are making people a target now.

And it’s just, you know, to sort of leave off my talk here, I just think that what I’d like people to understand is that so many of the things that as Canadians we’d like to think are sacrosanct, you know, whether it’s we live in a democratic society, we have a free and open media, we have academic institutions, like you said, Michael, that are these open spaces of knowledge exchange, all of these things are being severely eroded, seriously eroded. And I think that really what, you know, if Canadians don’t wake up pretty soon, you know, that democracy is going to slip through our hands, like grains of sand, you know, because it really is getting that intense. And so what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to try to organize, I mean, everyone’s already doing, I mean, the two other women on this conversation have been doing this for a lot longer than I have, but trying to organize whether we’re journalists or academics, I mean, we need to reassert these foundational values of a democratic society, you know, that we have academic freedom, we have free speech, we have the freedom of dissent and association and whatnot.

So I think that’s the way forward is we need to just keep organizing around these, these issues.

GR: Yeah. Vanessa, I’m like listening to Kevin, I’m reminded of the saying is back in World War Two, you know, Martin Niemöller, first, they came for the socialists, then they came for the trade unionists, then they came for this, the Jews, then they came for me.

And I mean, I don’t know, I’m, I mean, I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say we’re kind of on the same trapping, you’re witnessing this, you know, creeping levels of, you know, you know, fascism or something. I mean, but I mean, given your engagement, and you’re right, like in the thick of things with your journalism, and then speaking out unreservedly, what do you think the kind of engagement? Like, where is this leading? Do you think? I mean, what’s happening around us? And what could we possibly do to reverse the trend?

VB: Um, that’s a really interesting question. And, and, you know, I don’t have all the answers.

But I guess, if I look at what frightens them most, are these public talks, are these public conferences where people can come and hear you and ask questions and interact and meet you face to face? I mean, it’s fantastic, we will have YouTube, we will, well, some of us don’t, of course, because of censorship. But you know, the internet is a great tool. But I don’t think it’s as big a threat as meeting people in person and talking to them about your experiences, because the internet creates a kind of gladiatorial environment in which people can just put forward their arguments and challenge your arguments in a very aggressive, non constructive, counterintuitive way.

But when you actually go to these public forums, and interestingly, as a group, which was called media on trial, where we’re restarting this, particularly in the UK, but then spreading outwards. And I think the very fact that these kind of events are being cancelled and being attacked, I mean, mine were actually under attack from the extremist elements that had come to Canada from Syria, and who objected to my speaking about my experience inside Syria, which was very different, of course, to the portrayal of events in Syria by the legacy media, the colonial media across the West. But I think when you can actually sit down face to face, and have a panel of people who can present ideas and concepts and opinions in a very intelligent, constructive way that destroys their narratives.

And so for me, it’s not allowing ourselves to be isolated, to make sure that we’re creating groups of like minded people all the time. Because for example, I’m in Syria, you’re in Canada, other people are in Russia, we’re scattered. We don’t have that enormous resource pool, and complex, entire industrial complex of information manipulation that the ruling elite and the oligarchs and the military industrial complex, and the globalists have, we don’t have that.

But I think, and Russia is actually quite good at this, you mentioned Valdai, but there are many NGOs in Russia, for example, who are constantly establishing these kind of meeting places. And I think we need to start doing more of this, you know, breaking out of that academic paradigm where you’re in a minority, create the majority in another space. Including academics or including journalists.

And what I’d love to see – just one last thing – is this collaboration between like-minded academics and journalists, because that also has been eroded. And I think that’s what I found incredibly invaluable, because my experience for example on the ground combined with an academic investigation into a certain event is an invaluable combination.

So I think that sort of collaboration between independent journalists and independent thinking academics is incredibly important also for the future.

The Global Research News Hour airs every Friday at 1pm CT on CKUW 95.9FM out of the University of Winnipeg.

 

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