When the city of Vancouver made the push to get the Winter Olympics, Joe Bowser and citizens throughout BC were opposed. Through the ballot box and demonstrations they expressed their disapproval. As a result, they were spied on, targeted, and to this day followed by a Canadian government that knows no limits and sees opposition as terrorism.
I caught up with Joe at CCC2011, just a few weeks ago. He had presented his experience as the target of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police that has left him with little doubt that the present and future of Canada is dark. In this interview we discuss:
- The Winter Olympics Proposal
- The B.C. budget crisis
- First Nations People of BC
- Anti-Olympics Network
- Annecy Olympics
- The Harper Government
- The future
Joe on Twitter
Vancouver Media Collective
A new project came to my attention this week via global voices: The KGB Baltic document project. Decades and decades of secret KGB records and documents about activity in Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia.
Just glancing through the list of documents, translated to English, there are titles like:
- about the work done to expose Lithuanian and other bourgeois nationalists through the broadcast and print media.
- about the constant attention which should be paid to known writers of anti-Soviet documents written anonymously, and to those who published and distributed them.
or
- plan of the main KGB agency and operative measures on how to strengthen the KGB’s fight against ideological sabotage aimed at the country’s artists
Amazing to see the types of surveillance this secret and wide reaching agency was involved in. Just reading through these kinds of headlines, one might think to oneself “what a strange time that was”.
Yet what if we could get our hands on CIA and FBI documents from the last 2 to 4 years? Reading through info of how agents try to disrupt peace marches, or infiltrate groups organizing against the war. Artists and community leaders that are, as we speak, monitored and tracked.. in the name of “national security.”
For now Ill keep reading through the KGB documents and try not to see the parallels.