Trevor Greene and the Cowardice of Canada’s Pseudo-Left

Trevor Greene is a brave and progressive Vancouver writer who has dedicated much of his working life to writing about the downtrodden and the marginalized. Trevor is in critical condition today. The Canadian Forces' Civil-Military Co-operation unit he’d volunteered to work with in Afghanistan was ambushed in a remote village. Trevor was sitting with a group of village elders, taking extensive notes on the villagers’ needs. He’d removed his helmet and set aside his weapon. The ambush began when a jihadist crept up behind Trevor and brought an axe down upon his head.

The Toronto Star has a full account of the incident here.

Trevor was perhaps best known in Vancouver for the tireless work he undertook in the seamy underworld of the city’s downtown eastside neighbourhood, documenting the murders of Vancouver’s prostitutes for his book Bad Date: The Lost Girls of Vancouver’s Low Track. In 1993, Trevor wrote a popular book of investigative journalism in Japan, Bridge of Tears, which documents the plight of that country’s homeless people. Born in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Greene settled in Vancouver, lived on a boat in False Creek, and volunteered for duty in Afghanistan to begin what he hoped would be new vocation, convincing Canadian philanthropists to invest in aid projects in Afghanistan.

While Trevor was fighting for his life in the hours after the ambush, Vancouver’s “anti-war” crowd was already parading its troops-out banners in front of Vancouver city hall, and Canada’s Globe and Mail was offering its readers a disgraceful exercise in the most bleak sort of cynicism, all tarted up in the language of anti-imperialism, authored by York University's James Laxer. Canada and its NATO allies should pull out of Afghanistan even though the consequence would be a government that did not respect human rights and “could even be a fascistic theocracy,” Laxer proposes. In the next breath, Laxer says that this doomsday scenario is actually preferable, because if Canada stays the course, the “ornery” Afghans will likely end up resorting to a form of government “even more tyrannical.”

To believe such rubbish, you’d have to harbour the ugliest prejudices about Afghans, and you would also have to completely ignore what the Afghan people themselves say, and what the Afghan people themselves want. An extensive poll of public opinion in Afghanistan last fall shows that ninety-one percent of Afghans prefer the current regime to the deposed Taliban dictatorship, 87 percent say the overthrow of the Taliban was good for the country, and 77 percent say their country is headed in the right direction. Ninety per cent of Afghans believe women should be educated, 90 per cent believe women should have the right to vote, and 75 per cent of Afghans believe women should be free to work outside of their homes and hold office in the government. The people of Afghanistan will not achieve this noble vision if Canada’s so-called “anti-war” lobby has its way and NATO troops are withdrawn.

The emerging democracy in Afghanistan is under constant threat from anti-democratic forces whose immediate objectives are notably similar to those of Canada’s pseudo-left, succinctly described by Afghanistan’s ambassador to Canada, Omar Samad: “Their goal is to use time and a battle of nerves to tire us, to intimidate us, to make us doubt our objectives, to sow dissension and to turn it into a contentious political debate. In Afghanistan, this debate does not exist.”