It was only recently that the CC board found a joint open letter: Canada, oppose U.S. threats to rights, sovereignty and peace in Venezuela and the Americas (Nov. 2025) from the APGOPA (Americas Policy Group/Groupe d’orientation politique pour les Amériques). I’m grateful that this coalition was speaking out then, but discouraged that, in the “mainstream” there seems to be so few efforts to prevent the erosion of human rights, peace and justice. Then I heard the CBC Ideas episode with Sudanese journalist Yousra Elbagir, who spoke of the failure of the international community to protect people in Sudan and what that has meant on the ground. She explained that as right wing groups in countries like Canada focus almost exclusively on issues of short term material benefit, governments no longer seem willing to work to support human rights and international law. Sending UN peacekeeping missions to places where genocide was a threat didn’t bring an end to the threats but at least it mitigated those threats somewhat.

I thought about how, given how ineffective previous efforts to protect the common good seemed to be, it was easy to feel that our efforts had no effect. But what she said reminded me that our efforts do make a difference.

That being said, there’s no way we can make much needed changes, without fundamental change. I suspect Roger Hallam is correct in saying that revolution is upon us, no matter what, so it’s vitally important to work to make sure it will be one of radical democracy, not some form of authoritarianism. He criticizes “left defeatism” when people who see how badly things are going, just give up. And he reminds us that, when we look back, we see, over and over, that what seemed impossible at the time, with hindsight, feels inevitable. – the end of apartheid, the end of the “Iron Curtain”…(Sadly, some things, like the US wars on Iraq, or continuing to drill, baby, drill and burn, baby, burn, also seemed unthinkable, but still happened.)

by Jan Slakov