A4d- Ww. nesday, September 21, 1983 - North Shore News FLYING TO ASIA on a 747 last year, 1 caught a glimpse of the Kamchatka Peninsula off to the star- board. It was my first, and so far only, look at the physical terrain of the Soviet Union. Nobody shot us out of the sky — but the next time I catch such a glimpse, I will feel a lot less relaned than I. did then. As everybodyin 1 the world now knows, the- Russians test-fire missiles on the penin- sula and have deployed ad- vance MIG-23s equippéd with air-to-air weapons to the. islands south of Kamchatka and orth of Japan, where VICTORIA The subject of federal. _government grants. to” provincial groups is hot again, with the awarding of $19,500 to the Vancouver Island Human Rights Coalition. Attorney-General Brian Smith is fuming over the grant, issued to one of the groups which sprung up to oppose the provincial government’s plans to end the Human Rights Com- mission, and will protest it ed day, the destruction by a military jet of an unarmed civilian jumbo has re-earned the Soviets the epithet “SVodka-soaked potato heads.”’ For Canadians — -par- ticularly for the families of the nine who died on the *KAL jetliner — the act of high-tech barbarism comes as a grisly reminder of the fact that we do not, repeat not, live in a hippie’ s paradise ofa MacGuigan. The ‘grant follows one- of $600, 000 made to B.C. Unemployment . _Action Centrés, groups establish- ed before ‘the govern- ment’s: latest restraint rounds. - Labor Minister Bob McClelland has charged that that money will be chanelled into Operation Solidarity. Inflation up but only alittle VANCOUVER — B.C.’s rate of inflation is a mere 5.2 per cent, lower than the national average of 5.5 per cent and almost half what it was a year ago. Figures released Tues- day show the rate of infla- tion grew by only three- tenths of one per cent dur- ing August in B.C. On the national scene, the increase was half a per cent, leaving the August figure well below the August 1982, figure of 10.6 per cent. The bad news is a report from Manpower Tem- porary services that says hiring in the Lower Mainland will show a‘2.2 per cent decrease in, the final three months of the year. American shelling backs lebanese BEIRUT — The possibili- ty of all-out war continues to grow with develop- ments on a number of fronts this week. Despite the stand that they would fire off-shore naval bombardments only in defense of American peace-keeping troops, U.S. warships opened fire Monday on Moslem Druse positions to help the Lebanese Army beat back attacks. The fighting took place at Souk cl Gharb, the strategic village controll- ing access to the Beirut airport. volved i in one ‘kind of: blood- bath or:another, which adds up to more than 700 million people at -war. ._That’s.. one person ‘in six across the face of the planet. Some two million people a year are dying in ‘‘little for- gotten wars’’ such as the con- flict between Iran and Iraq, in Angola, Morocco, Nam- ibia, Afghanistan,Cambodia, Ethiopia, Chad, Nicaragua, El Salvador, North Yemen, © The Phillipines, course Lebanon. I think of Canada as being rather like The Shire, the peaceful kingdom in Middle Earth as fantasized by J°R.R. Tolkien, where food-loving and of ; Hobbits lived, blissfully una- ware that they. were actually caught up in the: great War of : The'Rings. The massacre of 269 inno- cents on KAL 007 should jog us out of our daydreams. In a world where the per- petual state of war prophe- sized for 1984 by George. ‘Orwell. seems to. have: “Deen... realized; where capitalism’ - and ‘communism: are ‘locked ~ Ina deadly planet-wide Strug- gle, where the Cold War bet= .- : ween’ “democracy and totali- _ tarianism has been. waged non-stop for an _ entire Introductory ; FOR LIMITED TIME ONLY! MEN & WOMEN, MON.TO FRI. 10AM—10PM SAT & SUN. 10AM—-6PM ‘mit, I shared the generation, Canadians, with our airy-fairy notions about the ‘good life sams any res- ponsibility - ‘for our own defence, :: “are. possibly the most“ unrealistic, out-of- touch, ostrich-like people on earth —‘to say nothing of be- ing spoiled rotten. For many years, I must ad- smug Canuck notion of ‘‘enlight- ened neutralism’’, a sort of quasi-pacifist feeling of moral superiority, according to which, whether it-was ever admitted or not, the idea of being ready to fight for one’s freedoms was somehow uncouth. Looking back, it is-easy to see that: as a war baby who has never had to take up arms, thank God, I lived a blessed but .very unusual existence. And the only reason I was able to live in such magnifi- cent peace was precisely because the United States has been saving my butt all this ~ time through its own military strength. ; It has been a 1 free ride, pure and simple. It was glorious while it . lastéd.-But I believe the situa- tion. is too désperate today for Canadians to indulge any longer-in the luxury of pre- tending. that we are not in- volved *:directly in a global life-or-death struggle. ‘We ‘have been unilaterally disarming, ‘through apathy. “getting ins shape militarily. “Mote on-this-in the next column. mark and ‘ogo _are fegistered trademarks of Bayerséhe Motoren’ lerke. 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