The New Democratic Party of Canada has become the ‘Neo-Conservative Party of Canada’
Written by: Nassim Noroozi
For anti-war/anti-sanctions Iranian activists, academics and for leftist Iranians in general, NDP used to be a bastion of hope for accommodating the rhetoric of peace.
The recent interventionist demands put forth by NDP with respect to Iran, have put these hopes, already hanging by the tiniest of threads, to rest. The NDP recently scolded the Liberal party for its lack of interventionism to designate a branch of the Iranian military - the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) - as a terrorist organization.
This was a move heavily endorsed by the MeK - a despised cult that itself was, ironically, designated as a terrorist organization because of -amongst other things- their dark history of collaborating with Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war. The demand was also endorsed by many Iranians within the diaspora, as it was presented to them as a major solution to challenge the Iranian government’s authority. This author also notes that, while she is not a supporter of the Iranian government, there are some in the diaspora that do support the Iranian government. The move to support listing a branch of the Iranian military as a terrorist organization by part of the diaspora, comes even though we know that designating a military branch of a government as “terrorist” is an anti-diplomatic move that can pave a smoother way for initiating war.
Jagmeet Singh has swerved NDP’s platform to a conservative curb when it came to aggressive policies about interfering in the internal affairs of a country that has sovereignty over its national resources, and failed to even note that sanctions have been defined as “an imposition of pain”* on a people.
Now “a pro-sanctions party” when it comes to Iran, NDP’s interventionist action plans seem to be mirroring Trumpist hawkish aspirations. Be it in a petty attempt to earn votes, the agenda they put on the table includes action points that the Trump government and pro-war groups could only have wished for.
Sanctions and cutting diplomatic ties are oppressive actions on the part of the Canadian government as they affect the financial livelihood of Iranians. Sanctions also open the door for corruption as the government has to create backchannels to sell national resources, which will subsequently impede national scrutiny over how the national resources are being administered.
NDP’s neo-conservative policies can themselves result from the frustration of the Iranian diaspora with the Iranian government. This in turn makes Iranian NDP activists desensitized about how the imposition of sanctions against Iran is itself an expansionist project rooted in Britain and the CIA’s subversion of democratically adopted decision to nationalize Iranian oil industry back in the 1950s.
This desensitization will also make the Iranian NDP activists apathetic towards the problematic history of sanctions in and of itself. Conservative and Liberal Iranian activists have mostly tended to be okay with playing the role of “native informants” for the West. The most troubling characteristic of a native informant in our scenario is that they are seen as policy experts solely by the virtue of their race or by simply “coming from a geography”. This is dangerous as in the case of Iran these “experts” are often times abhorrently ignorant -or choose to remain this way- of the troubling history of the West’s interventionist policies towards Iran. In this respect, NDP members and the Iranian NDP activists seem to be comfortably following suit.
When it comes to Iran, sanctions imposition was a penalizing measure against the demands for Iranian sovereignty, and a tactic to ensure that the colonial interest of Britain would be maintained. Having Iranian oil nationalized would jeopardize Britain’s interests: hence the imposition of hardships through embargo and freezing of Iranian assets outside of Iran, an eventual rolling out of a CIA operated coup for “regime change”, forcibly removing a democratically elected Prime Minister, reinstalling the Shah, and harassing Iran since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. The NDP Iranian activists who are calling for such measures should think about these historical facts and remembers that these action plans are preludes to war and -have been successfully used to cause- the suffering of their nation.
All this to say that the frustration of the majority of the Iranian diaspora in Canada has led to them having become desensitized about the sheer harm of sanctions. This is giving the NDP -which used to be a somewhat left political party- a free pass to push for neo-conservative action plans. When it comes to ideas, political parties are not “just” representatives of the voices of the people. When aiming for peace and decolonial trajectories, it is the responsibility of political parties to take on the difficult task of explaining why is it that they are taking a particular position, as it is often the case that mainstream positions are very well-established and are often quite favourable to the ears of future voters.
While this might seem as a momentary -perhaps desperate- attempt to gain traction, the NDP’s legacy will go down as one that was complicit in paving aggression. In fact, their stance on Palestine isn’t serious nor committed to eventual Palestinian sovereignty. When it comes to decolonial positions there should be no hypocrisy as much as it is politically possible. NDP used to provide this somewhat, but it has gone off the deep end now.
This could partly be as a result of the possible troubling role that the presence of some Iranian-Quebecois political figures in trying ever so hard to hijack the party’s agenda and direct it towards simplistic notions of regime change when it comes to diplomatic relations with Iran.
It is time to say “rest in peace” to the idea of the NDP having progressive stances on foreign policy, and from now on view them as a neo-conservative party in this matter[AJ2] . For what it is worth, they might as well change what their acronym to NCP: the Neo-Conservative Party of Canada.
Editor’s note: The article has been modified to fit The Canada Files’ guidelines.
References
Khajehpour, Bijan, Reza Marashi, and Trita Parsi. "Never give in and never give up." The Impact of Sanctions on Tehran’s Nuclear Calculations, in: National Iranian American Council (2013).
Wilber, Donald Newton. Regime change in Iran: overthrow of premier Mossadeq of Iran, November 1952-August 1953. Spokesman Books, 2006.
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Nassim Noroozi is trained in Philosophy of Education and a lecturer in the same field. Her research focuses on ethics of resistance in today’s colonial context. Her doctoral work specifically examined the relationship between the phenomena of time, colonization, and resistances against it.
Due to smears that ensued after her public philosophical engagements on manifold modes of colonialism, she became interested in the role that fallacies play in sustaining the logics for an unjust world order.
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