Location: Mondragon Bookstore and Coffee House, 91 Albert Street, Winnipeg
Sponsor: Peace Alliance Winnipeg
Admission: free, but the hat will be passed to help defray expenses
Lester Pearson is one of Canada’s most important political figures. A Nobel Peace laureate, he is considered a great peacekeeper and ‘honest broker.’ But in this critical examination of his work, Pearson is exposed as an ardent cold warrior who backed colonialism and apartheid in Africa, Zionism, coups in Guatemala, Iran and Brazil and the U.S. invasion of the Dominican Republic. A beneficiary of U.S. intervention in Canadian political affairs, he also provided important support to the U.S. in Vietnam and pushed to send troops to the American war in Korea. Written in the form of a submission to an imagined “Truth and Reconciliation” commission about Canada’s foreign policy past Lester Pearson’s Peacekeeping: The Truth May Hurt challenges one of the most important Canadian foreign policy myths.
Yves Engler has been dubbed
- “one of the most important voices on the Canadian Left today” (Briarpatch)
- “in the mould of I. F. Stone” (Globe and Mail)
- “ever-insightful” (rabble.ca)
- a “Leftist gadfly” (Ottawa Citizen)
His six books have been praised by Naomi Klein, Noam Chomsky, William Blum, Rick Salutin and many others.