Today a panel of experts reports to the Canadian people and Parliament on the country’s future role in Afghanistan. Opinion is divided. Recent polls have found a majority of respondents favouring withdrawal.

One of the submissions to the panel came from the Canada-Afghanistan Solidarity Committee. Comrade Terry Glavin was the co-author, along with Lauryn Oates of Women for Women in Afghanistan.

We will have more on the report and the debate once its released. For now Terry has some comments here. At the core of our statement is this:

We recognize the conflict in Afghanistan as a liberation struggle, waged by the Afghan people and their allies, against oppression, against obscurantism, illiteracy, and the most brutal forms of misogyny. It is a fight for democracy, and for peace, order, and good government. It is also a struggle waged by the sovereign Government of Afghanistan, a member state of the United Nations, against illegal armed groups that seek to overturn the democratic will of the Afghan people. In Afghanistan, the great global struggle for the recognition and protection of basic human rights – universal rights - is being waged with a particular and necessary ferocity. We cannot and must not retreat from that struggle.

Today is Martin Luther King Day, a federal holiday down there in the United States. It is so because the American working class made it so.

It’s useful to remember that what MLK accomplished, he accomplished in alliance with trade unionists. It is also proper to recall that the reason he was in Memphis that day 40 years ago when he was assassinated was to demonstrate solidarity with striking members of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees.

The movement to establish a holiday in MLK’s memory sprang from the labour movement. Its beginnings can be traced to 1969, when a small group of workers at a General Motors plant in New York refused to work on MLK’s birthday, and the bosses backed down when a larger group walked out in solidarity with the GM workers. Hospital workers in New York won MLK’s birthday as a contract holiday later that year, then followed other hospital workers, then 80,000 dressmakers. By 1973, union leader Cleveland Robinson was urging his members to take the day off “regardless of contractual obligations or permissions of employers,” and his union pledged its full resources to any worker punished for doing so.

And so the movement grew. One state after another established Martin Luther King Day as a statutory holiday, and the labour movement’s support for Jimmy Carter’s successful presidential bid in 1976 resulted in the declaration of MLK Day as a federal holiday.

Remember.

Worst Analogy of the Day: is “Campaign Auschwitz” coming next?
“The fight for the nomination ‘is going to be like the Bataan Death March,’ said Ron Kaufman, a top adviser to Mr. Romney.”

From the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

From Wikipedia:

The Bataan Death March…was later accounted as a Japanese war crime…The march, involving the forcible transfer of 90,000 to 100,000 American and Filipino prisoners of war captured by the Japanese in the Philippines from the Bataan peninsula to prison camps, was characterized by wide-ranging physical abuse, murder, savagery, and resulted in very high fatalities inflicted upon the prisoners and civilians along the route by the armed forces of the Empire of Japan. Beheadings, cut throats and being casually shot were the more common and merciful actions — compared to bayonet stabbings, rapes, guttings (disembowelments), numerous rifle butt beatings and a deliberate refusal to allow the prisoners food or water while keeping them continually marching for nearly a week (for the slowest survivors) in tropical heat.