Page Four
THE FISHERMAN
Ifiefijherm&n
Representing The Orqanaed Fishermen And Shoreworkers of Brtti'h (..olumbia
6,550 Copies Printed This Issue Published Every Friday except the last Friday of each month by The Fisherman Publishing Society, 138 East Cordova St., Vancouver, B.C. Telephone MArine 1829 Advertising Rates on Application
Editor.............................. GEORGE NORTH
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Death Of OPA Grim Warning To Canadians
C UDDEN death of the Office of Price Administration as *^ a result of hatchet work on the part of the United States Senate and House of Representatives, provides a graphic example of what can happen when a government is dominated and controlled by one small, narrow selfish section of the nation.
Using as their battle-cry the accusation that government controls were destroying free enterprise, initiative, etc., powerful American monopolists prepared the setting, set the stage, then told its stooges in government to act. They, like any set ef marionettes, guided by trained fingers, did their master's bidding.
As a result, 130,000,000 people in the U.S. almost overnight have been faced with prices double, more or less, for all sorts of the most essential foods and goods. In the meantime, the U.S. senate dawdles, the puppets prattle as they filibuster the bill for new OPA to a point where, if OPA is ever reconstituted, prices will have gone too far out of control for regulation, particularly with loopholes which will appear.
Bearing out what organized labor has long stated, that monopoly was on a sitdown strike, is the sudden appearance of lots of butter, beef, and other hard-to-get goods—at a price. And what a price! The theory that reduced prices will result from increased production and competition is bo longer a truism. There has for years now been an abundance of many "commodities but, because monopolists control the market, they have been sitting in warehouses, awaiting uncontrolled prices so that sheer necessity will force the consumer to pay prices beyond all reason. This is an artificial scarcity.
Certain producer groups will make temporary gains, it is true, but these will be, and are being, wiped out as costs generally, skyrocket. This is runaway inflation, obviously not even remotely caused by higher wages as monopoly's propagandists would have the public believe. This is indeed the "real McCoy," this crazy situation across the line. It is a grim, real warning to us in Canada. We cannot allow this to happen here. It must be made constantly and ever more sharply clear to the government of Canada that this is not the pathway which Canadians will follow.
Friday, July 12, 1946
On The World Scene
News Writers Cannot Tell Truth In U.S. Press
ANEWSPAPERMAN'S heaven is a place where he can tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth . . . Generally speaking, the public isn't getting it—and here I raise my cry of protest in the name of many thousands who would put out more honest, more conscientious, more upright newspapers if they had the simple privilege of uniformly objective writing—and of getting it printed.
[Examples given: an elevator falls in a big dept. store (advertiser) and a dozen are injured; the hometown papers suppress the news. Scores of divorce items about small people appear, but not the news of the local banker's marital troubles. Wire services still send out "Kill it" and "Must kill" on items concerning "super-duper big shots." Editors suppress news of connivance between police chiefs and certain criminals.]
PLAY UP STRIKES TO HARM LABOR
Strikes—yes, they are news, and in proportion to their importance. Some of them are deadly important, some are triviata. In wartime it made no difference to the average publisher whether a strike was important or trivial. Trifling importance was magnified until strike news became not news but a flood of deliberately planned propaganda to discredit labor unions.
Lockouts—yes, they were news too, but differently handled, if at all. So also were deliberate and planned acts of employers, conceived in malevolent hatred with intent to provoke strikes. How many of these planted causes ever reached the public through the press?
Management strikes against the government in wartime—aluminum, steel, motors, to mention a few—how many of them ever got the play? Even as much as did a 24-hour flash-in-the-pan wildcat strike brought about under extreme provocation?
UNIONS HAVE NO CHANCE IN PRESS
And what chance did a union have then, or does today, of getting its side of a controversy before the public through the average newspaper on even terms with a large employer? Virtually none, because the large employer is always two jumps ahead of the union—he is an advertiser in the first place, and he uses additional paid space to tell his special story the way he wants it told. Witness the NAM campaign, the steel industry campaign, the General Motors campaign—all full pages at a shot. It's no use to protest that labor unions have the same privilege—maybe so—all they lack is money to pay for it. Rare exceptions, of course, but obviously unions can't come close to matching that kind of money.
Take for example the eager zest with which newspapers seized upon that war-time faked story of merchant seamen refusing to unload a munitions ship in the south Pacific, and the failure of a large share of them to give ungrudging and equivalent publicity to an official government statement that the story was false.
1917 LIE MILL OPERATES AGAIN IN 1946
I remember the days immediately after World War I, when certain venomous newspapers established their staff men in the states bordering Bolshevik Russia, who sent out a barrage of false propaganda, such as, for example, stories that marriage had been virtually abolished by the Red government. In my youthful innocence I then believed them. I know now it was just a lie mill operating under the guise of the great American press. Today the technique is smoother but the motif, as to Russian relations, is the same. It springs from selfish hate.
Naturally, some will wave all this aside, muttering "communist!" and spitting at a portrait of Roosevelt. My only answer is that I love an American communist just about as much as does Alfred P. Sloan but have more respect for the Russian species than I have for certain American newspapers currently doing their best to get us into a war with the USSR. "You furnish the PICTURES and I'll furnish the WAR"—so W. R. Hearst is accused of saying in a wire to Frederick Remington when the war with Spain was yet unforeseen. The precedent is dangerously close to a repetition. This they call newspapering! I call it invocation to mass murder. Newspapermen don't like it.
Freedom of the press! How many mockeries in thy name! From warmongering to isolationism; from libel to lickspittle; from sandbagging the unwilling customers to gypping carrier boys out of their nickels and pennies!
Generalizing is dangerous, for always there are the exceptions, both among publishers and among the writers they employ. Yet what publishers as a class most need is a sense of responsibility to the whole public rather than to a selected few—in other words a PUBLIC as distinguished from a PRIVATE conscience. . . .
—The Colorado Editor, University of Colorado
Molotov Remembers 'Frisco, Fascism Tried At Nuremberg
By AL PARKIN
«
/""\NE Of the significant features of recent political developments has been the rela-
^-'tive amount of agreement prevailing at the Paris conference of the Big Four foreign ministers.
Contrary to the predictions of certain American observers, especially those who professed some admiration for the "get-tough" policy of U.S. state secretary James F. Byrnes, the Paris meeting did not end in a blow-up. Instead, it has lasted for several weeks during whjch a considerable amount of work was accomplished. Not all of the decisions made have been as positive in the direction of peace as could have been wished. But there are defin-•tie indications that the plans of U.S. imperialists to push forward their point of view, even at the risk of smashing the foreign ministers' council, had to be partly abandoned, at least for the time being.
Far from being able to throw a wrench into the conference machinery, Mr. Byrnes had to back down on a number of issues, among them Trieste and the matter of Italian reparations to Soviet Russia.
On the other hand, the possible effectiveness of the 21-nation peace conference, now scheduled for July 29 in Paris, will be lessened through the fact that the Big Four were unable to agree on an agenda which could be placed before the peace conference for the delegates' guidance.
The so-called, "stubbornness" of Soviet Foreign Mlniiter V, M. Molotov on this Issue of an agenda was actually an attempt to ensure that the 21 nations who will gather to write the Europeah peace treaties would be guided by the Big Four decisions, and that the conference could not be wilfully wrecked by a gang-up of lesser powers led by either Britain or the U.S.
For Molotov has not forgotten —if others have—how the U.S. swung the voting power of the Latin American countries into line at San Francisco, and won the admission of Argentina to the United Nations.
That was an example of the "democratic" procedure which Mr. Byrnes admires. But it was a democracy which permitted nations that had not even fought in the war, and were in no position to maintain the peace, to over-ride by sheer voting strength the interests of such anti-fascist powers as Soviet Russia.
Mr. Molotov is apparently fearful of just such an outcome to the peace conference. It explains his proposal that the Big Four adopt rules of procedure for the meting. And the fact that his request was over-ridden in favor of a weaker compromise places a big
question mark before the 21-nation meeting on July 29.
* * * •THAT story from the Nurem-* berg war crimes hearing concerning fat Herman Goering's extortion of millions of dollars in bribes from German prison camp inmates, serves as a reminder that the conspiracy trial of some 20-odd leading German fascists— for the most gigantic as well as the most dreadful crimes in history is still pojng on. Indeed, were it not for the odd
story from Nuremberg so sensational as to force the news services to give it coverage, we would be getting very little information on this most vital of world events.
On the other hand, it would not be just to attack the entire prosecution of the trial as being needlessly slow or a waste of time. A tremendous amount- of material and evidence has had to be sifted in the attempt to show that it is not merely the defendants who are being tried, but the entire system of fascism. And to date that sifting of evidence has disclosed or confirmed the following undeniable facts:
• The complicity of German big business in Hitler's seizure of power and violence against peoples.
• The encouragement given Hitler by the English Cliveden Set, led by the infamous Chamberlain.
• The fact that the Munich pact of 1938 rescued Germany from a military venture it was not at the time strong enough to undertake.
• The fact that the attack on the Soviet Union was planned as early as 1939, and the criminal complicity of Franco, Admiral Horthy of Hungary and the rul-
ers of "poor little Finland" in Hitler's aggressions and atrocities.
The establishment of these things alone is sufficient to show why certain sections of the world press, themselves deeply involved in the pre-war intrigues, are so reluctant to give adequate and interpretive coverage to the trial. Already the interests of too many people in high places have been linked with the Nazi criminals.
In addition, the stories of Nazi atrocities being told before the Nuremberg hearings are being played down by the daily newspapers, apparently on the excuse that such stories are "old stuff.'" Yet it is necessary to know the terrible extent of those atrocities to understand exactly what world fascism set out to do.
No person in the world should forget that the German fascists put to death not less than eight or nine millions of people by torture or the gas chamber!
No man or woman who loves peace and personal freedom can forget those pictures of stacked up shoes and sacks of human hair, the pitiful relics of thousands of children deliberately exterminated at Maidenek and Os-wiecim; or forget what must have' been the thoughts and sensations of each human to whom these belonged, or those they loved, or who loved them.
The Nuremberg prosecution has invented a new word for the Nazi crimes—"genocide"—meaning the murder of a whole people, which Germany carried out against European Jewry. It helps us to realize that the population held and tormented and drenched in filth by Germany in its network of concentration camps, amounted to the population of a fair-sized European state.
There are vicious people in high places who would like us to forget these things. They suppress the news from Nuremberg, or distort it by picturing Goering as a clown, but a "likeable" clown nevertheless.
But the world's working people, who suffered mainly from the German fascist horror, can be forgiven if they don't forget. Most labor men watch every item of news, every bit of comment, that comes out of Nuremberg.
For the fascist conspiracy now being unveiled in that German courtroom is part and parcel of every decent person's struggle to root out the fascist peril to civilization for all time.
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■ ■ I ■ ■
Building Our Union
By HOMER STEVENS
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THE main problem facing our union in the organizational field insofar as the Vancouver area is concerned is that of strengthening and tightening up in those sections which, although they are covered by our agreements, are nevertheless considerably short of being 100% organized. Some strides have been made in the salmon seine fleet this year by Brother Otto Jewor-sky and myself during the past couple of weeks. One of the important features of regular checkups such as this is to impress on all union members the extreme need for active, well-informed boat delegates.
There is no substitute for the boat delegate system as a means of keeping all members in touch with current union problems, of eliminating friction and needless disputes, of guaranteeing that union agreements are properly lived up to, and of generally strengthening our union. ,
To depart from a subject which has been raised in this column so often that perhaps it is becoming monotonous, I'll deal briefly with the progress made by the union sub-committee on Area 17. The department of fisheries has been approached and has agreed to cooperate as fully as possible during the coming season to ensure a fair return for all the fishermen concerned. They agreed
IIIIIMIIIIH
to place at the disposal of our committee all their available statistics such as the number of boats operating in the area and landing figures.
The committee has also met with a sub-committee of the operators where several important decisions were made. First of all we agreed to apply for an extension of the Area 17 boundary slightly beyond the boundaries of 1942. This will enable the seiners to operate quite efficiently and to take their just share of the expected run. The operators also agreed to cooperate with us to work out a plan of curtailing the seiners in the extended area sot that the gillnetters will be assured their share of the catch.
In order to provide for all eventualities the operators agreed to prepare well in advance of the season all information possible on the daily capacity of the plants both for canning and storing, plus the estimated availability of packers, scows, etc. The operators wired their representatives in Ottawa outlining the agreements which we had reached on this matter and have since been assured that the boundary will be extended by the department.
The various meetings which the gillnetters and seiners held during the early part of the year laid the groundwork for an elim-
ination of the causes for hard feelings and disputes between the two classes of gear. However, I would like to point out to each and every gillnetter and seiner that in order to complete the program it will require the fullest cooperation from each member of the union.
Your sub-committee will be on the grounds during the season, with power to act in accordance with the general plans agreed upon by the locals in this area. The decisions of this committee, therefore, will be union decisions and must be carried out by union members to the letter. The policing and execution of all decisions will be the- responsibility of every individual member and the union as a whole.
★ ★ ★
r[E other day a man whom I was attempting to persuade to join our union came through with an argument so new that I think it's worth repeating here. In effect he said that unions should fight for lower consumer prices. However he also said he was opposed to strike action. Well, I ask you, how could we get lower prices without a general strike, considering the type of government official in office today? The government thinks nothing of smashing the picket lines and forcing strikes back to work at bayonet point, if they can get
The
THREAT
To
PEACE
By ALAN MAX
SENATOR WARHOl'ND ON THE MENACE TO PEACE: "IN this age of scientific marvels ■a new weapon has been invented. It surpasses in destructive power anything man ever dreamed of. It makes men, women and children afraid at night. It makes architects the world over plan to build factories and cities underground. I refer, of course, to that new secret weapon: veto power.
"The secret of veto power is possessed by the Soviet Union alone. It is reported that deep behind the Urals, Soviet scientists are building up a stockpile of veto power, sufficient to destroy 400,000 amendments designed to whitewash Franco.
"The Soviet Union seems to object to being outvoted by the United States and Britain on issue after issue. But this can be avoided by peaceful methods. All the Soviet Union has to do is to vote with us—and then she will never be outvoted.
"Meanwhile, with this terrible new power, the Soviet Union tries to bully the rest of the world. Fortunately, America cannot be bullied. Virtually disarmed as we are, we, nevertheless, have one spiritual weapon to fall back on: atomic bombs. ^
"Feeble though this instrument may seem, and dedicated, of course, solely to the ways of peace, we may yet find, with God's help, a way to use this atomic power to protect us from the terrible onslaughts of veto power.
"Let us work to free the world from fear. Let us work so that, in days to come, innocent people, awakened in the middle of the night, can go back to sleep contented, knowing the roar in the night can be nothing worse than a small atom bomb made by the same duPonts who, as the whole world knows, gave us nylon stockings." *
Book Review
The Great Conspiracy, by Albert Kahn and Michael Savers, Progress Books—$1.25.
DY every standard, the most im-portant book published in years, THE GREAT CONSPIRACY by Albert Kahn and Michael Sayers will shortly be available in a new reprint edition at $1.25. The original edition was priced at $3.50. Progress Books is publishing the new edition in magazine form.
THE GREAT CONSPIRACY, subtitled. "The Secret War Against The Soviet Union," lays bare the intrigue and plotting against Russia ever since the Czars were overthrown in 1917. Although it reads like a spy thriller, its sensational facts and hitherto unpublished documents cannot *be challenged, for every statement is carefully proved beyond all doubt.
The book is May-June dividend selection of The Book Union, the new Canadian progressive book club which is making a name for itself in the Canadian labor movement.
The authors begin their story with the exploits of the notorious Sidney Reilly, arch-spy of British Secret Service, who led the fight to destroy the USSR. It fully exposes the plots, with all their international ramifications, of those who allied themselves with certain high diplomatic circles to bring about dis-asted to Russia. Finally, the authors catch up with those individuals and groups who today are actively campaigning to start a new war against the Soviet Union.
The new edition by Progress will have new material and a new Introduction by Senator Claude Pepper. It will be available through all bookstores, through the Book Union, or direct from the publishers. It can be ordered through the Coop Bookstore at 337 West Pender Street in Vancouver.
away with it. On the other hand these officials bow their heads to monopoly capital and blandly hand them price increases on a silver platter.
We can, by constant pressure, force our government to consider our side of the picture to some extent but until we get a government that really represents the workers we'll always get the dirty end of the stick.