CKNW Editorial
for October 16, 2001

National NDP leader Alexa McDonough’s thoughts on how the United States ought to have referred the terrible events of September 11^th last to the United nations are interesting from a couple of points of view.

I was very definitely amongst the living when the United Nations Organization, as it was then called, was born in 1945. Our Social Studies classes studied very little else. And Ms McDonough is right to say that this organization was set up to stop wars. The trouble is it hasn’t and indeed can’t do so if it wanted to.

A caller yesterday chided me for being hypocritical in supporting the Rule of Law when, as he gave as an example, it impacts on refugees but not when it hits the United States. Let’s examine that for a moment. We’re talking about two different things. With nations that respect the Rule of Law there is within that nation a court system made up of people who are independent of the issues at stake. This is not so with the United Nations and can’t be expected from it. The United Nations isn’t a judicial body but a political one.

In theory, the Security Council should be seized of a matter of international conflict, quickly deliberate, then act. There is no way this can happen. In fact where the United Nations did fight it was only because President Truman, in June of 1950, in Korea, committed American troops as UN troops then finessed the matter past the Security Council when Russia wasn’t looking.

Does Ms McDonough really believe that if the United States had referred September 11 to the Security Council – or to some mysterious ad hoc committee as she suggests - anything would ever have been done?

Should have the United States, after that enormous insult, patiently have asked the Security Council to investigate the matter and then, if it found enough evidence, lay a charge or charges against Osuma bin Laden and others then waited patiently for them to surrender themselves to the International War Crimes Court in the Hague?

That would have made as much sense as it would have for Poland to lay before the League of Nations the gross breach of international law committed by Hitler on September 1, 1939.

The explanation for Ms McDonough’s behaviour has to be found somewhere else than a love of the Rule of Law. And it is found with very little searching involved.

The New Democratic Party is in terminal distress and Ms McDonough is making the grave mistake of trying to take the party back to its roots in order to save her own political skin.

But why is that a grave mistake, you ask? Shouldn’t a party go back to basics from time to time?

No it shouldn’t … for the simple reason that if political parties have problems keeping their policy abreast of the times party, party constitutions and their preambles invariably become embarrassingly out of date after awhile.

The beginning of the end of the Social Credit Party came when, I believe it was 1987, Michael Levy challenged the preamble that talked of the party being bound by Christian principles. Until then religion had never come into question simply because the Socreds, as do all successful parties, simply chose not to look at its fundamental principles.

Perhaps a better example is the famous Clause 4 of the Labour Party in the UK. This clause which committed the party to collective ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange was to haunt the party for decades. Every time a leader would get the party on the road to broad political popularity, along would come the appeal to go back to the party’s roots and everything would go into reverse. It wasn’t until Labour abolished party fundamental that it could move to the center where the people are.

The NDP doesn’t have a Clause 4 but it has something else just as rudimentary – hatred of Americans. The natural constituency for anti-Americanism – which connotes anti capitalism, anti free trade – traditionally has supported the NDP. Of course the NDP doesn’t "officially" hate the United States but it sure as hell does in fact.

Alexa McDonough is afraid that if she supports the US in its war on terrorism she will lose favour with the anti-American wing which, along with the establishment of Organized Labour (also coincidentally anti American) is all that’s left in the Party.

Ms McDonough’s struggle is with the Svend Robinson wing and the positions he takes. He represents the conservative wing of the NDP. Indeed he is the old guard – anti American, anti business, anti free trade.

This puts Ms Mcdonough in this pickle. If she stands for modernizing the party and accepting such things as free trade she not only alienates herself from the conservative wing of the party, but, because that’s all that’s really left, she alienates the entire party.

What the NDP as a party hopes for is that they will attract the new left – Naomi Klein and her acolytes – and thus fill the party membership and coffers. Ms Mcdonough hopes that if she says "me too" to whatever Robinson says, she’ll survive.

Maybe that’s sound strategy. I only observe that all left wing political parties since I began thinking of these things have hoped that the current generation of youth in revolt against the establishment will join them and take them to political victory.

It never works. Youth in revolt never has the patience to work through the political process and by the time they’ve outgrown marching in the streets they’ve outgrown the reasons they marched as well. Like the revolutionaries of the 60s, they become stockbrokers.

What Ms McDonough is saying with her silly bleats about the marvels of the United Nations is that the NDP is in deep doo doo, and so is she.