ARMS DEALING & WHEELING

Even during the COVID pandemic and the climate crises, the Halifax Security Forum was back in town last week — in virtual format.

Last year, over 300 military and government personnel attended the gathering at the Westin in Halifax. Entirely based in Washington, D.C., we have to ask ourselves, why does this group use our good name? It isn't enough to have 800 military bases around the world with Covid-filled warships lingering about? Now Halifax has to virtually harbour this nonsense.

Details online about the “nonprofit” event reveal an annual income of $4,159,131. The so-called security forum is a network for “business, military and decision makers.”

Now, if I see those three descriptors together it spells one thing to me: arms dealing and wheeling. If you want to make a profit from war machinery, then historically, the steps toward civilian suffering are pretty well laid out.

The light-hearted workshop descriptors — titles like “London Outs, Brussels Pouts” and “Afghanistan's Final Piece” and “Biden his Time” are an insult to the true cost of militarism and gloss over how the world remains constricted in the straitjacket of NATO'S promotion of U.S. exceptionalism.

Were there any workshops encouraging a nuclear-weapons-free NATO as an ultimatum for our membership? Where was that workshop entitled “Never Again?” After all, this is the 75th anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the racist overtones of how and where the war machine works has a deep shadow in our own history.

Our wartime prime minister, William Lyon Mackenzie King, wrote in his 1945 diary that dropping the bomb on Japan rather than on “the white races of Europe” was preferable.

Why wasn't the real story at a Security Forum about the security news of the year? How 570 nongovernmental organizations came together in the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN). They forged a collaborative road to justice and hope, resulting this year in 50 nations ratifying the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. This treaty will be international law on Jan. 22, 2021. Cities from Vancouver to Halifax have urged the federal government to courageously support a new way forward — with the power of the people leading the way, and not the war machine. There remains an empty spot on the treaty, waiting for Canada's signature. Kathrin Winkler, Halifax