Today is Remembrance Day -- November 11th, 2019 -- and an article (scanned below) appeared in one of Canada's national newspapers describing the agony, death and destruction of the war by drugs being waged against the people of Vancouver, British Columbia. The same battleground can be found in every town and city of the Western World.

In this never-ending war by drugs our governments and their agents and agencies -- ie politicians, police, lawyers, doctors, nurses, social workers -- are the soldiers supplying and wielding the weapons of mass destruction -- ie the legal and illegally distributed pharmaceutical drugs and the paraphenalia like needles etc etc and safe injection and consumption sites to use them. In my opinion they are purveyors of evil feeding off human misery.

Yesterday I had to make a trip to the local hardware store. On the way I passed the epicenter of our "Horror on Hastings" Street. Maybe you've heard of it, maybe you haven't but here it is as I see it... Okay here I am at ground zero of the drug problem in East Vancouver in Canada. Behind me is the Carnegie Public Library -- long since closed or ceased its function as a library. Now it's a social center. This area is famous for a lot of things but probably top on the list is a drug problem that centers around this particular intersection here and goes down about five blocks that way and about the same amount that way. And in fact just a couple hundred meters is the main Vancouver Police Department. So yes, this goes on right under the nose of the Vancouver police. You'll probably seen a few cruising by here in the course of this video. So it's not for a lack of police that we have this problem, that's for sure. Now I've got my backpack attached to me snugly because I wouldn't dare come down here without it attached. So if they're gonna take this bag you're gonna have to take me with it. My camera on the other hand is sitting down there alone just propped up between a couple granite walls and a bank. So if you see me making a mad dash for the camera it's me protecting my camera from getting stolen. Well I'm about to go take a tour through what we call the war zone because that's what it looks like. There's stuff being sold everywhere from food to computer parts that obviously people have stolen to support their drug habit. So let's go see the site of Vancouver that you're not going to see in the tourist brochures... I only live a few blocks from here, the world-famous East Hastings. What I'm gonna do is walk right through it and keep the camera rolling so you'll see what I see as we walk...

All the best,
Jackie Jura

James Cleland Richardson was one of the many young men from the Vancouver [British Columbia, Canada] area who heeded the call to fight for Canada and for freedom in the Great War of 1914. In those days, recruitment for military service in the Vancouver area was centred around the old courthouse that olnce stood on Vancouver's Hastings Street... He volunteered for active military service with the Canadian Expeditionary Force and soon after found himself on European soil engulfed in the horrors of the Battle of the Somme - a battle in which more than half a million allied soldiers were killed or wounded...

But now flash forward more than 100 years to 2019 and imagine, justs for a moment, that James Cleland Richardson were to return for a day to where it all began - to that spot on Hastings Street where the call was issued for young men to fight for Canada and freedom...

Today, standing on Hastings Street where the old courthouse once stood, he would see in its place the Victory Square Cenotaph - a grey, three-sided, granite obelisk 30 feet high adorned with Canadian flags. Surely this would encourage him. "They remembered us", he might say to himself as he read one of the inscriptions: "Their name liveth for ever more: 1914 - 1918".

But as he watched the self-absorbed young people with their cellphones lounging on the steps of Victory Square, might he wonder whether they know or care anything at all about what he and his companions did or sacrificed? Were the deeds and names of him and his companions mentioned in any way during the schooling of these young people? If they were called upon to make some major sacrifice for freedom or for Canada, how would they respond? Would they respond at all?

The answers to these questions might trouble James, but not nearly as much as what he would see if he were to continue to walk east down Hastings Street from the cenotaph. A street strewn with garbage, with homeless people sprawled in doorways and alleys, begging from passersby; mentally ill people wandering aimlessly about and scores of human beings addicted to everything from alcohol to opioids; drug peddlers, sex-trade hustlers, black-market racketeers and other unscrupulous entrepreneurs all prowling Hastings in search of prey.

Might not such a sight - in the very shadow of the Victory Square Cenotaph - cause him to ask, "Was this what I and my companions sacrificed our lives for? Has the freedom we purchased at the cost of our lives become for many the freedom to destroy their lives? Are these people the casualties of their own choices or the hapless victims of some war I and my generation know nothing about?"

How would we answer James Cleland Richardson if he were to put these questions to us? How would the successors to the federal, provincial and municipal dignitaries, who spoke of the value of freedom and self-sacrifice at the dedication of the Victoria Square Cenotaph, answer such questions? And how would we answer if James were to propose a response to the tragedy of Hastings Street - perhaps the only response that his wartime experience would suggest to him? What if he were to say: "In the midst of the terrible trench warfare of the Battle of the Somme, the unsung angels of mercy who brought us what comfort and relief they could were the stretcher bearers. "They came, hazarding their own lives, to where we lay wounded. They dragged us back from no man's land to shelter. They gave us water and bandaged our wounds as best they could. The chaplains gave us spiritual comfort as we learned to our surprise that dying is a spiritual as well as a physical ordeal. And if, in our pain and delirium, we begged to be left alone to die, these angels of mercy disregarded our pleas as they carried us back from the front lines to comparative safety.

"So where", he might ask, "are the stretcher bearers of Hastings Street?" In 2019, that would mean where are the medics, shelter providers, social workers, addiction counsellors, chaplains and other helpers - not in small numbers with inadequate resources, but in the numbers and with the resources actually sufficient to clear the battlefield? And what should be their response to the wounded of Hastings Street who, in their pain and delirium, insist on being left alone? As individuals and as a society, are not these questions we should seek to answer and respond to as we honour the memory and self sacrifice of James Cleland Richardson and others like him this Remembrance Day?

Remembrance Day on Hastings Street, by Preston Manning, Globe & Mail, Nov 8, 2019

Victory Square Centopath in the heart of Vancouver's drug war (note the helicopter skimming above and snooping in everyone's windows)

Trafalgar Square changed to Victory Square in 1984 (and the statue of Lord Nelson has been replaced with a statue of Big Brother)

Trafalgar Square was created to commemorate Lord Nelson's victory over the French Fleet at the Battle of Trafalgar off the southern coast of Spain on the 21st of October 1805. One particularily famous signal sent out to the fleet by Nelson during the battle was "ENGLAND EXPECTS THAT EVERY MAN WILL DO HIS DUTY". In the end, Admiral Horatio Lord Nelson was to perform the ultimate duty as he was fatally wounded by a French marksman while his flagship, Victory, was locked in close combat with the French ship Retoubtable. Today, Trafalgar Square has become one of London's greatest landmarks and gathering places for people.... If you arrange a meeting in Trafalgar Square, specify a specific place like the steps of Saint Martin's as the Square itself is fairly large and almost always filled with people...

ORWELL'S 1984 LONDON LOCATIONS

IN AFGHAN FIELDS

ORWELLIAN WAR BY DRUGS (...Members of the Brotherhood are prepared to: give one's life; commit murder; commit acts of sabotage; betray one's country to foreign powers; cheat, forge, and blackmail; corrupt the minds of children; distribute habit-forming drugs; encourage prostitution; disseminate venereal diseases; do anything which is likely to cause demoralization of society...)