Wika OR 2 oe Se at oer ties Natit Cowe be bern ZN Reed INYO CL SN sO key “a purely Canadian union without outside affiliation, ences seerecss Published Weekly at ROOM 104, SHELLY BUILDING 119 West Pender Street Vancouver, B.C. by the TRIBUNE PUBLISHING CO. MArine 5288 SUCURSCLEREUETESOACECCESECUCKSECCNLCCSELECIESCUCTRCHOCUCCECERRACER ESE TOM McEWEN . Editor IVAN BIRCHARD Manager EDITORIAL BOARD Nigel Morgan Maurice Rush Minerva Cooper Al Parkin Subseription Rates: 1 Year, $2.00; 6 Months, $1.00 Printed By UNION PRDNTERS, 2303 Bast Hastings Street _ — —_ Yancouver, B.C. Authorized as second-class mail by the post-office dept.. Ortawa ‘Freedom of the press! URING the past week the strike at the Daily Province has added new content and meaning to our much- vaunted ‘freedom of the press.” “Freedom” to smash a trade union, backed by an extra-legal court edict and the full weight of the city police, has marked developments of the last few days. s The powerful Southam newspaper chain, a monopoly which nearly a year ago set out to smash the International Typographical Union, local by local, in its six plants across the country, has set in motion a campaign of violence against labor in Vancouver in order to achieve its open-shop aim here. The Province strike will soon be in its eighth week. Until three weeks ago the strike was a very peaceful afiair, too peaceful apparently to suit the Southam open-shoppers. The ITU men maintained their picket line, often augment- ed by other sympathetic unions, both AFL and CIO. Notn- ing untoward happened. No ome was molested either entez- ing or leaving the Province building. Drawing from _ the experiences of its open-shop drive against the ITU in Ham- ilton and Winnipeg the Province management, on a plea of “intimidation,” secured a blanket injunction against the ITU, restraining the union from picketing the Province building, and placing other restraints which in their totality are an infringement on all legal rights and privileges of citizens. Next the Province brought in a full staff of pro- fessional scabs and strike-breakers from its Hamilton ‘and Winnipeg plants. These the Province euphemistically terms ”? assert- ing that the majority are “returned veterans.” With this motley collection of scabs, covered by a vi- cious extra-legal injunction, the Province got out its first issue in the sixth week of the strike—on July 22. This brand of “freedom of the press” is a very costly luxury to the citizens of Wancouver. Scores of police are continuously on duty around the Province building. Patrol- cars and police motor-cycles are requisitioned to escort whatever papers may get by a mass picket, and many ar- rests of union and sympathetic pickets on trumped-up charges have already been made. Wie CORNETT has appealed to labor to observe ‘Jaw and order.” His appeal is timely, but misdirect- ed. It should be addressed to the Southam Company, which provoked violence by importing professional scabs into a union job in a unicn city. Instead of complying with the Southam Company’s demands for “more police” to strength- en its open-shop provocation of violence, the city’s chief mag- istrate should call a conference of Vancouver trade unions and with them demand lifting of the injunction and restora- tion of the right of men to protect their jobs from the oenslaughts of labor-hating employers’ hirelings. From professional strike-breaking, which it has added to its concept of “freedom of the press,” the Southam Com- pany now seeks to cover up its nefarious work by red- baiting. In this it is joined by the News-Herald which also sees in the violence provoked by the Province a violation of “the sanctity of the law.” Together they chant the old Te- frain of every would-be Hitlerite, “A Communist mob .- .- - So, because Wancouver citizens, in the majority, support organized labor, they must all be Communists? To Hitler, too, all his enemies were Communists and Jews. And then this: “One report said that a number of the demonstrators came out of the office of the Pacific Tribune, Labor-Pro- gressive organ, carrying slats of wood studded with nails.” A complete fabrication, but nevertheless an indication of what the Province considers to be the “freedom of the press.” And what about “the sanctity of the law’? How sacred is the law held under the terms of an injunction that is itself in flagrant violation of the law? Who hasn't heard that cry of communism from every monopolist philistine seeking to cover up his crimes, from Hitler down to the most miserable CMA hanger-on? If not a single member of any union, whether a communist or not, picketed the production of a scab Province, would the Southam monopoly, the cham- pion of this “freedom of the press,” look any more kindly towards the rights of trade unionism? The injunction is sufficient answer in itself. The violence provoked on Tuesday by the Southam: Company must be answered by organized labor in the only way it can be answered, by a strong picket line, and by a flood of protests against the injunction to the govern- ment, M.P.’s and MLA’s and members of the city council. PACIFIC TRIBUNE — PAGE 4 Handing democracy the old 1 - 2 Democratic tinge By TOM McEWEN OULD one have momentarily drawn aside the curtain and peered into the sacred sanctum of editorial effort, which is guided by the lofty principles of “pro- gress and democracy, tolerance and freedom of thought’? he would have heard a heart-rend- ing sob. In fact two heart-rend- ing sobs. One gurgling its way up from the well-springs of hu- man sympathy; the other shaking the editor’s sweating diaphram in sheer gratitude, but both har- monizing in a perfect blending of ideology ...a ‘meeting of minds’ so to speak. The first sob was for the ex- ecution of the Yugoslav traitor Mihailovich. Why or why did they have to bump off this man? “Many must feel that the formal charges of treason brought against him were but excuses, and that his real sin was that he was in opposition to the kind of govern- ment Tito has given his country.” Wow isn’t that just too regret- table. Our editor seems to have forgotten in the midst of his lachrymose grief, that Mihailo- vich was fighting with the Ger- man Nazi invaders against his own people, while Tito was mo- bilizing the ‘Yugoslav peoples to fight fascism, and that Mihailo- vich’s decision to become a Nazi traitor did not stem from the “kind of government Tito has given his country” but from the belief (shared by many others of his ilk) that fascism was in the saddle to stay. This seeming grief for Mihailo- vich has another and deeper rea- son in this editorial harmonizing of ideals. It places the traitor of Mihailovich in the “opposition”’ and deplores the fact that such is the fate of all opposition in countries where the communists as well as the fascists have un- trammeled power. The sobs for the execution of a traitor are thus blended with popular (in certain circles) anti-Soviet clamor. The editorial sob begins to take on a definite political content. As the grief-racked editor grinds out his daily contribution to bourgeois morality and politics, we learn that the execution of Mi- hailovich “typifies the obstacle that makes difficult the meeting of minds between nationals whose people have different ideas of what political freedom means.” Under a seeming plea to “be merciful,” the editor tearfully plows his way to a conclusion. “The democracies,” says he, “have managed, at least to some ex- tent, to tincture their politics with moral ideas?” NICE word that ‘tincture.’ The second sob—the one of gratitude, upon this ‘tincture.’ There can be little doubt that had Mihailovich, or Quisling (on whom Britain con- ferred the Order of the British Empire in the 20’s for espionage work in the Soviet Union), or a score of other leading Nazi ele- enlarges ments whom we could name, had been, let us say, in Greece or the British or US-German zones, they would have become the “demo- eratiec tincture” in the new re- gimes emerging under British and US bayonets. The whole of the sob editorial “No Meeting of Minds” is designed to utilize the just execution of the traitor Mi- hailovyich to slander communism. and in the ethics of commercial journalism, place communism and communists (which of course must include the USSR?) outside the pale of bourgeois moral ideas. Let us réturn to the question of this “tincture of moral ideas” which is devoloped in the editor’s second sob in a practical man- ner. We are informed that the Greeks are a very grateful people —so grateful for what we in Can- ada have done for them in the way of food and other supplies, that they have named a street in Athens after Mackenzie King, and another in the capitol of the Dodecanese as ‘Canada St’ We agree with the heart-broken edi- tor that the Greeks are a grate- ful people, but without reminding the Greeks of how well they have preserved the great ideals of Peri- cles, and Xenophon, Socrates, Aristotle and others of the sages and brave fighters of a bygone day, we might remind the editor that the “‘democratic tincture” ap- plied by British and US bayonets in the recent elections, which re- turned to power the Greek Mi- hailoviches and Quislings, are hardly to the liking of the Greek people themselves, and have little to do with the great traditions of Marathon and Thermoplyse Such names roll off the lips of Mr. Churchill in his periodie anti- Soviet poetic flights, and sends © thrills up the spine of paid scrib- blers of the Dorothy Thompson species, but have little bearing on the Greek people, who bravely and heroically banded themselves ~ into the Greek Army of Libera- tion (the ELAS) and freed’ their country of the German and Ital- 4 ‘ian invaders, only to have it taken over by Mr. Churchill and Mr. Bevin at No. 10 Downing St In a phoney election set-up, where the dead were permitted to vote ~ and the rebel Greeks driven from the polling stations by British = Tommies (see the reports of the WETU, the British Parliamentary delegation, and other authorita- tive bodies) the eriginally brought fascism t0é Greece. NLY recently the “gratitude” sobs have been somewhat shaken up by the dynamic Fie rella La Guardia, chief of the UNRRA, who has made public the fact that relief to Greece has pot been reaching the Greek people, but rather reaching that “democratic © tincture” has paved the way for: the return of the monarchy which ~ section which names streets after | Mackenzie King as a token Of “sratitude” fer permitting then to return te power against the wishes of the people, and enable them, in the best Hooverian tech" nique, to use food as a political” weapon to keep their starving and oppressed populations in sub- jection. Mr. Ika Guardia’s recent comments about Greek gover | ment officials (by the grace of Bevin and the British army) a7 akin’ to his comments on a Hk gang of corrupt political gang” sters in Nanking, who also at using the food of UNRRA amass millions and consolidatt reactionary governments. | The editor’s sob for the traite Mihailovich and the ‘gratitude? © the Greek people, reminds one © the sobs of Chamberlain for tb), Spanish people; sobs which hare ened into the stones of “nor intervention” to crush Spanis: democracy. Of such is the boul gois “tincture of moral ideas” = FRIDAY, JULY 26, 19!