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Journalist and author Glenn Greenwald, the award winning journalist who published Edward Snowden’s US government surveillance programs, on Thursday said that Canada cannot be surprised by the recent violence in the country.
“Canadians shouldn’t allow this week’s violent attacks in Ottawa and St-Jean-sur-Richelieu to scare them into giving up more freedoms and privacy to the government in the name of protecting them from terrorism”, Greenwald said during his speech at McGill University on Thursday.
He was referring to the shooting on Parliament Hill in Ottawa and an incident in St-Jean-sur-Richelieu, both of which seemingly targeted the Canadian military.
He also challenged the nation to change their peaceful perception.
“I have no doubt that that community where that act took place is peaceful, but the foreign policy of Canada is not peaceful. Canada has spent 13 years involved in wars”, he said, adding that Canada can’t be surprised with violence committed on home soil after its involvement in Afghanistan, among other places; Canada is currently poised to join the action in Iraq as well.
“That is not remotely to say that that violence is justifiable, only that it is inevitable,” he clarified.
“There is a huge gap between how a citizenry perceives its own country and the reality of what its country is doing in the world. That’s essentially another way of saying that the citizenry has been propagandized. It has been led to believe some pleasant version of truth about itself that is actually completely at odds with the reality of what its own government is engaged in”, he said.
He also said that his article after the shootings in Ottawa, in which he asked Canadian officials why they considered the terror plot on their home soil as “shocking”, had seem to have “triggered national waves of rage among Canadians”
