A life full of lies, an autobiographical blog by Kevin Henley

Introduction

I have been teaching history to university and college students in Montreal, Canada, for over thirty years. My goal here is to present, as concisely as possible, the main events of my very active political and intellectual life, while simultaneously underlining how those events correspond quite well with the overall history of the baby boom generation. What I want to do is to attract readers genuinely interested in studying anti establishment ideas and politics. Once they have read my text, or at least the parts of it that they find relevant, I would like them to react to what they have read by offering their own take on those relatively recent events, and on how all that has influenced what is taking place nowadays.

Some people might want to react to this account of what happened in my public life because they were also involved in the same historical events. For example, hundreds of thousands of people participated like I did in the very distressing new left movements in North America during the 1960s and the 1970s. Hundreds of thousands more were active in the equally distressing union movement in Canada, not to mention the Quebec independence movement, over the past fifty years.

Still other lives were directly affected by the often acerbic debates within the teaching profession in which I also participated for many years. Others may be intrigued by the same bitter controversies in political, economic, social or cultural history for which I made my own contributions. This last group could include some of those who read one of the books that I published on skepticism during the first few years of this century, when I lambasted the various spiritual and secular ideologies in the world for having led so many people down the garden path. Like millions of other victims, I became extremely bitter over the years about the different ways in which many political and religious leaders have succeeded in ruining their followers lives, not only a long time ago but also very recently.

After five decades of study and activism, I have come to the conclusion that most people have been unable to make much progress in their lives, because of the extremely toxic behavior of the small handful of egotistical monsters who control the purse strings of the most important public and private organizations in this world. Unfortunately, human society seems to function as a kakistocracy, which is to say a world in which the worst people tend to rise to the top. As a result, humanity as a whole has become divided into two very unequal groups, a smaller gang of sadistic social climbers and a much larger group of long suffering masochists who end up doing most of the work and trying to pull up the slack created by the first group.

In fact, this fundamental division started to develop even before human beings began living in large urban based civilizations about 6000 years ago and seems to be getting worse nowadays rather than getting better. For a short time after the Second World War, it looked as if some of us had figured out how we could finally escape from the different varieties of official corruption. However, since the outbreak of the neoliberal counter revolution in the 1980s, the masters of the universe (money managers and traders), have ratcheted the entire world downward, back into a sort of infantile regression. They consciously ignore all the warning signals about economic, environmental or social collapse, deliberately doing exactly the opposite of whatever needs to be done.

Doing evil has become the official ideology of most of the people wielding real power, rather than being seen as an unfortunate consequence of the dark side of human nature, as it used to be treated in days gone by. Like criminals or juvenile delinquents, our self proclaimed masters have decided not to take an adult attitude toward anything at all. They are relying on belief in magic, old time religion and libertarianism to provide them with some sort of ideological justification for their toxic behavior. Those who behave in this perverse fashion are knowingly irresponsible, trying to do as much harm as possible, to everyone but themselves, in the shortest possible time, just to prove that they are the “baddest bad asses” who ever existed. Unfortunately, if this kind of atavism continues on for several more years, it will soon become impossible to avoid major relapses in the overall level of human development.

When I started my adult life fifty years ago, however, I had no idea that I would be making that kind of pessimistic observation half a century later. Back in those days, I was under the naive impression that even though the world was far from being perfect, things did seem to be moving in the right direction. Like millions of others, I thought that with a lot of effort progressive minded people could succeed in making our planet a considerably better place in which to live. After awhile, I found out that one of the reasons why idealists like me were thinking that way back then was because my childhood and the early part of my adult life took place during a period known as the “thirty glorious years” between 1945 and 1975.

This was an expression that was originally used by diplomats at the United Nations, who thought that those years were glorious because that was when most of the countries in Asia and Africa became independent nations instead of European colonies. Several economic historians agreed with the diplomats that those were glorious years because they constituted the most important period of economic development in world history, before or since that time. Many social historians also agreed with this positive assessment because the income gap between the social classes actually diminished during those years. Before that period, that gap had always had a tendency to increase, as it has been doing again even more drastically since the neoliberal movement started taking over.

The thirty glorious years were also a period in which governments tried to play a much more positive role than most of them do now. Following the numerous crises of the first half of the twentieth century, especially the world wars and the great depression, most countries gave up on the laissez faire attitudes introduced back in the nineteenth century and embarked instead on a long series of programs designed to encourage economic growth, as well as social and cultural development. The libertarian counter revolution that started in the 1980s, however, means that most positive government interventions have gradually been abandoned.

To be sure, as with any other period of history those same glorious years just before the advent of neoliberalism were not really a golden age. For one thing, we were then living during the most dangerous part of the cold war, when many people thought that they would be soon vaporized in a world wide nuclear exchange. Back then, however, a lot of us were under the illusion that if we humans could just avoid blowing ourselves up, things could turn out to be a lot better than they always had been in the past. So millions of us got involved in all sorts of progressive movements, trying desperately to figure out which was the best method for moving forward.

Several decades later, unfortunately, we are all living in a very different world from the one that baby boomers like me happened to land in when we were much younger. This makes me feel that everything in which I was involved over those two consecutive periods in fact fits very neatly into that larger pattern of recent historical evolution, from that more hopeful world to this less hopeful one. So in this text I want to move continually back and forth from my own public life to the general history of the past several decades.

Almost everything important seems to have changed drastically during my own lifetime. For starters, instead of a nuclear catastrophe, nowadays most people tend to think that if they are going to be wiped out before their time, it will probably happen as the result of a massive ecological breakdown instead. That is definitely not something that would have occurred to most people during the three decades following the Second World War, no doubt because some of the incredible economic growth during that period was based on environmental blindness. Although in reality the threat of a nuclear war has not declined as much nowadays as a lot of observers seem to think, recent financial crises have also revived the very real possibility of another great depression like the one that took place during the 1930s. As a result, even though some things are better than they were before, it is hard to find anyone who is as optimistic as people like me were fifty years ago.

In other words, much of what happened during the first several decades of my life took place because a lot of us got involved in movements that fitted in very well with the overall spirit, or zeitgeist, of that earlier period. However, even then we were still living in a world that was under the domination of extremely powerful egomaniacs, which means that many of our naive hopes for the future did not really have that much chance of success.

So let me get started on this double assignment, showing in a conceptual way how my own political and intellectual life intersected with the topsy turvy nature of recent ideological history. I first started thinking about the zigzag world I was living in several years ago, when I originally got the idea to begin writing about my own life. Quite a few things were happening to me back then that induced this kind of socially based self reflection. For one thing, after many decades of bouncing around from one unsatisfying job to another, I had finally started teaching history full time, a profession that I found more pleasing than anything I had done before that. Teaching history over and over again to thousands of younger people soon provided me with most of the insights that I needed in order to understand how my own life has been fashioned by the paradigm change from the thirty glorious years to the libertarian counter revolution.

I was able to gradually leave behind manual labor and only part time teaching, in the early part of my adult life, by following up my bachelor of arts degree with a master of arts and a doctorate. Both of my theses, for the MA as well as for the PhD, were focused on a nineteenth century battle that was fought between two rival doctrines, economic nationalism and economic liberalism. During my research, I soon found out that everyone involved was only too eager to defend his (or her) own particular point of view and to denounce his enemies point of view. Typically, each side chose to ignore information that did not lead them in what they thought was the appropriate direction. In other words, my research was pushing me toward an ever more skeptical interpretation of reality, just like in my political and professional life.

At the same time, I was also involved in several ideological debates within the teaching profession, most notably over the competency based approach, both sides in those debates also choosing to ignore any inconvenient or contradictory information that they might happen to come across. Over time, I found out that even the content of the history courses that we were teaching was often based on deliberate misinformation, each teacher endlessly repeating long established versions of historical events that were originally pre fabricated for political reasons.

Another major change taking place in my life had to do with my own political activity. After several decades of actively supporting such major ideologies as socialism and nationalism, in various different disguises, I became extremely frustrated and disgusted by the tremendous gap that always existed between what those movements were supposed to be doing, and what they actually ended up doing. So I finally decided to turn my back on all that and instead, I embarked on the publication of the books about skepticism that I mentioned earlier. For each book, I used a variety of references, as well as my own experience, to debunk the world’s major belief systems, focusing on the most important religions and secular ideologies. I published those books, one after the other, during the first decade of the current century.

This time out, I have decided to make my socially grounded, personal history directly available to anyone consulting the web rather than try to publish it in book form. Doing it this way gives me an opportunity to update and improve my earlier insights, as well as backing up my ideas with quite a few new sources, including hundreds of internet searches. Some of this research has to do with the various historical debates and controversies in which I got involved over the years, as well as the events and movements in which I myself participated.

Nothing in this world is more intriguing than the stultifying effect of ideology on the evolution of different people’s lives, whether they were themselves aware of that influence or not, at the time. Unfortunately, human thought seems totally dependent on metaphor and structural context, with the result that no one has ever been able to avoid ideological barriers to understanding. As Daniel Gilbert pointed out in his book, Stumbling on Happiness, human brains are constantly imagining future outcomes in highly imperfect ways, including things that should not have been included and failing to include other things that should have been included. People are constantly assuming sequences of events based on ideological projections that are more wish fulfillment than reality.

So we are always setting up blinders around our thought, constructing not only such ideologies as socialism and nationalism, that have become much more marginal nowadays, but also currently dominant ideologies such as liberalism and conservatism, not to mention the world’s most popular religions and sects. Most of the things that I tried to do during my life, and that other people around me were also trying to achieve, were therefore based on mythical interpretations of reality, in other words competing forms of collective hysteria. The lies that people are constantly telling each other lay behind the various errors that we made before we became older and (sometimes) wiser.

Childhood and adolescence

My goal in presenting this text to other people is not to dwell on my private life. Instead, I want to refer to my own political and professional experience, as well as my research and my earlier writings, to show why I arrived at the general historical conclusions that I was mentioning earlier. Which means that in this opening chapter, about my first nineteen years, I only intend to write about events that had a real influence on some aspect of my public or intellectual life since that time.

For example, in one of the little Canadian towns in which we were living, I had a hard time accepting the ultraconservative views of two of our young friends there, who tried to conscript us into an evangelical Protestant religion by teaching us a bunch of religious songs. My opinion of the place was not helped either when I watched the annual Orange Lodge parades going down main street, commemorating the Protestant (“Macs”) victory in Great Britain, over the Catholics (“Mics”), back in 1690. They were always singing their true-blue Orange songs, which included lines like the following ones: “Oh, Mic hit Mac and Mac hit Mic, and Mac hit Mic thereafter; ten thousand Mics lay down their sticks, in the Battle of the Boyne in water.”

At about the same time, during the second Berlin crisis, all the children in my school had to go through various drills, like the one where we had to get under our desks and bend over with our hands over our heads, in case of a nuclear strike. To say the least, it was not a very realistic response. In the event of a nuclear war, as various radicals pointed out at the time, the only thing for ordinary people to do was to bend over real far and “kiss your ass goodbye”. Because of my critical reaction to incidents like those, I began my intellectual life already very much opposed to both religion and militarism.

To find out why the world was set up the way that it was, I started reading a lot, taking out subscriptions to geography and news magazines, as well as making the most of the educational toys that I received from my parents, such as a microscope, a telescope and a chemistry set. I also started actually reading the daily newspaper that I was delivering to the people on my paper route. During those same years, I met quite a few teachers who helped me get interested in history and English literature, as well.

As a result, I paid attention to those songs on the hit parade that had a certain amount of historical content in them, such as the one about “The Battle of New Orleans” in 1815, sung by Johnny Horton. I remember one of the local disk jockeys getting upset about that song since it referred to how the Americans beat “the bloody British”. In those days, most English-speaking people in Canada were still recalling their origins as United Empire Loyalists, counter revolutionaries who were driven out of the Thirteen Colonies immediately after the war of independence. However, such songs are not nearly as well remembered by most people as some of the much less political tunes that are still being played over and over again today.

In high school, I came in second in a public speaking contest, in which I tried to defend the United Nations. Unfortunately, back then that school still practiced compulsory military training for boys. This meant that we all had to get dressed up in army uniforms and parade up and down in the football field, carrying fake rifles while being watched by the girls, the teachers and our parents. During one particularly hot day in June, I remember holding my breath in such a way that I genuinely lost consciousness, upon which I was promptly pulled off the parade square and got to sit under the shade trees instead, with all the other weak boys. Another time, I managed to emphasize to my classmates just how much of a weirdo I was by insisting on standing outside in the hallway every morning while everyone else was reciting the Lord’s prayer inside the classroom.

My interest in literature was developing quite well during those years. It was then that I attempted to read all the great books of western civilization, such as the Bible, which after an exciting start soon became a boring account of Israeli tribal heroics, under the watchful eye of a rather parochial god who was always picking on Israel’s unfortunate neighbors. Some of the other parts of the Bible, however, such as “Ecclesiastes” and the “Song of Solomon”, were far more interesting. In any case, I got more enjoyment out of reading English romantic poetry, as well as various novels from the nineteenth century, particularly some of the Russian ones. Other times, I went with friends to a local bookstore, where we would read and discuss science fiction stories. My particular favorite was the Daniel Keyes story, Flowers for Algernon, with its emphasis on how different life can be for people with very different capacities for learning.

One interesting event that took place was my participation in a local radio show. As high school students, we were all supposed to think up some amusing skit to deliver on the air. On November 22, 1963, I was therefore scheduled to go on the local radio broadcast with my imitation of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, featuring such typical lines as “We shall pursue this policy with vigor and force and direction.” I was cut off, however, by the high school principal who came running up to inform me that I could not do that skit since the president had been shot. Several years later, I remember underlining an account of Malcolm X’s own reaction to the Kennedy assassination, when he muttered that “the chickens have come home to roost”, presumably meaning that Kennedy had been killed as a result of his own actions.

All in all, my years of high school were quite useful, particularly in giving me a certain cultural heritage. For one thing, I managed to accumulate a whole slew of remembered verses, which I still recite to myself nowadays. Unfortunately, young people are no longer obliged to commit anything to memory, a fact that limits their cultural horizons for the rest of their lives. The ability to remember several reasonably long passages from the soliloquies found in Hamlet or Macbeth, a dozen quatrains from The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (Edward Fitzgerald), or even a few lines from poems written by people like Shelley, Poe or Swinburne, makes life a lot more interesting down the road.

By this time, I was getting more and more interested in unorthodox ways of thinking, so I started subscribing to the bulletin of the Canadian Humanist Association for awhile. At one point, I also campaigned for the mildly socialist New Democratic Party (NDP) during  the 1965 federal election. Canvassing the entire town for the party, I soon discovered that it was clearly divided between a rich section, with very large houses and lawns, and a much poorer section, especially around the trailer park. Another time, I went to Toronto by bus to meet some humanist friends and on the way back I started talking to a young NDP supporter who had just been to a meeting of the Buckley caucus in another nearby town. The so called Buckley caucus was a small group of rightwing social democrats opposed to the leftwing “Waffle” faction inside the NDP. They used the name Buckley for fun, since William F. Buckley, Junior, the American journalist and ultraconservative, in fact hated all socialists pretty much equally.

During one of my visits to the big city, I met several people who were not only involved in atheist organizations but also in various anarchist and left-wing groups. One local anarchist put me in touch with the Student Union for Peace Action (SUPA) in Toronto, which interested me a lot even though I did not become a university student until much later.

A socialist in Toronto

The next summer, I moved to Toronto altogether. From there, I made my first trip to Grindstone Island, a resort situated in the cottage country that had originally belonged to a big shot in the Canadian armed forces. His daughter had turned the place over to a religious group, which decided to set up a center for world peace and an institute for training nonviolent protesters. This was my first real introduction to the Canadian peace movement and I attended the conference as a very naive young person, soaking up world politics. A year later, I went back to that place for a second visit, thereafter getting myself involved in a series of other leftwing organizations.

I was initially quite intrigued with the humanists, a group of professional atheists or at least agnostics, who had developed what some people might call a left liberal outlook on life in general. The Canadian Humanist Association belonged then and as far as I know still belongs to the International Humanist and Ethical Union. This group of intellectuals, recognized by the United Nations, are interested in any number of ethical issues as well as firmly supporting the idea of world federalism. In those days, I also subscribed to the magazine of the American Humanist Association, which devoted a lot of space to the antics of “Mad” Madelyn Murray. She was an atheist who spent her whole life trying to get God and religion truly separated from the government of the USA, as Thomas Jefferson would have wanted. It seems that she initially succeeded in getting the Supreme Court to ban compulsory Bible readings from public schools, but most of her related efforts met with no success whatsoever.

Needless to say, this sort of thing was right up my alley, following so closely on my own high school rejection of the Lord’s prayer, and any other officially imposed beliefs. The problem with those atheist organizations, however, was that they were mainly interested in combating the influence of religion in society and were not ready to also categorically reject such secular religions as liberalism, conservatism, socialism and nationalism. Coming mostly from western countries, the atheists largely condemned fascism and communism as reprehensible, totalitarian, ideologies, but they did not apply the same skeptical logic to the milder brands of capitalism, socialism or patriotism. On the other hand, I soon ended up supporting radical socialism for awhile, as well as a combination of nationalism and democratic socialism, later on, so for a long time I was as much under the influence of secular ideologies as the organized atheists were.

The people who I met in Toronto, especially an anarchist couple, also introduced me to the writings of various anarchist thinkers, such as Russian authors Mikhail Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin, and a communist anarchist from the USA known as Emma Goldman. I also read some of the articles of a more recent American author, Paul Goodman, who had quite an influence on my friends. During that same period, I was invited to attend a Sunday morning breakfast club at a large downtown hotel, where a group of likeminded people were talking about various radical ideas.

My reading of several books and articles about anarchism, however, did not make me want to move in that direction at all. Unfortunately, classical anarchism was often plagued by ultra elitism, particularly toward the working poor. Many anarchists also harbored the ridiculous notion that urban terrorism could be used to jolt millions of ordinary people into changing their traditional ways completely. More than a few anarchist thinkers believed in total revolution as well, by which they meant supporting polymorphous perversion, which was not something that I was interested in at all.

My heady introduction to the world of ideas also included several visits to the offices of the afore-mentioned Student Union for Peace Action, which I found out had gotten its start as the Canadian branch of the international Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). They evolved into one of several groups helping to organize protests against the Vietnam War in front of the US consulate. Several decades after that, I enjoyed explaining to my students how the peace symbol got its start as a cryptogram for the CND, something that few people knew about, at least until recently. Some Christian fundamentalists in the USA still seem to think that it was originally a medieval sign for the devil.

One of the books that I read during those days was True Believers, Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, by an American longshoreman, Eric Hoffer, who had developed a theory about ideological influences. In his book, he explained how all fanatics, whether religious or political, believe in their different points of view in essentially the same way, by insanely reiterating a particular outlook that has little or no basis in reality. According to him, all those people continually reject any information whatsoever that is in contradiction with their prejudiced way of looking at things. I found out much later that this same author was honored by none other than Ronald Reagan during his period as president, which is highly ironic since Reagan himself was such an extreme conservative. Nevertheless, I should have taken that book much more seriously at the time, because it could have prevented me from getting mixed up in all sorts of fanatical activity myself later on.

My summertime visits to the peace resort were very exciting introductions to the world of politically oriented intellectuals, such as Anatol Rapoport, a renowned American professor who gave a paper assessing the risk levels for violent conflict being provoked in the future by several different world leaders. After an initial period as a meeting place for leading academics and diplomats from around the world, the center soon became an exclusively North American conference and vacation spot for people interested in nonviolent social change. Dozens of psychedelic dope fiends also insisted on skinny dipping and the kind of uninhibited, outdoor sexual activity that thoroughly scandalized all the died in the wool conservatives who dominated the surrounding rural population in the area. The leaders of the center, however, tried very hard to promote responsible values, notably by requiring everyone to participate in doing the dishes every day, no matter how well known some of those participants may have been.

By that time, I had developed a much more radical approach to the Vietnam War than the one that the pacifists or their psychedelic friends were adopting. By reading various documents that I found in the SUPA offices in Toronto, some of them written by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), I found out about the extremely high levels of popular support that the Vietnamese communists enjoyed. So I decided that the only way to end the war was for them to win it, which, as it turned out, they did. I wrote a well documented report to that effect for one of the nonviolent seminars at the peace center, which did not make me a very popular person among the organizers of that event. One of their leaders, Murray Thomson, tried to convince me to change my mind about the war, but at the end of a long and very animated conversation, we both stuck to our own separate opinions.

The pacifists themselves were often quite honest. During one of their communal gatherings, they divided themselves up into rival groups and tried as best they could to simulate the kind of psychological and social conflict that so often takes place in the real world. They did such a good job at imitating reality that several good pacifist friends ended up hating each other and wanting to kill each other, at least on paper.

After the seminar on nonviolence was over, I hung around the resort for a few more days, wallowing in the spectacular outdoor scenery. I also managed to memorize a few bars of some of the antiwar folk songs from the USA that they were always playing, like “The Draft-Dodger’s Rag” (Phil Ochs), “The Eve of Destruction” (Barry McGuire) and “Lyndon Johnson Told the Nation” (Tom Paxton). Another Paxton song, “What Did You Learn in School Today”, focused on all the lies that children are always being taught in order to justify every official decision ever made. One line in that song, about Americans pretending that George Washington himself never told a lie, is an ironic parody of the dishonesty involved in all attempts at hero worshipping.

I also stayed for the next seminar, this one dedicated to reconciling differences between English Canadians and French Canadians. One of the speakers was a professional historian from Toronto who went on to become good friends with the future Canadian prime minister, Pierre Trudeau. I was more impressed, however, with the contributions of Stanley Ryerson, the Marxist author of a history of the Canadian confederation, who would later become one of my university professors in Montreal. A group from Montreal, specializing in intercultural relations, had also decided to attend that particular event.

In those days, Quebec had a very romantic reputation among people in the antiwar movement. Here was a place inside North America where a popular nationalist movement was threatening to tear apart the Canadian nationstate. Some of the more extreme separatists even used rhetoric that sounded like the propaganda coming out of places like Algeria and Cuba. Their labor movement was also becoming much more radical than the one in Ontario, or any of the other Canadian provinces or American states. Apparently, even the CIA was investigating Quebec nationalism using the same branch of the American spy network that also dealt with Cuban activities. All the radicals therefore adopted a very unrealistic attitude toward Quebec, which was never really any more liable to follow in Cuba’s footsteps than most of the workers in English Canada were ready to become socialists or communists themselves.

Back in Toronto, I was trying to make a living for myself, working initially as an order desk clerk for a company selling educational toys. This was not something that I was cut out to do, however, and I ended up making a lot of stupid mistakes on the telephone. Instead, I had to be satisfied finding manual labor jobs in various warehouses, where I started out making $1.56 an hour.

During that same period, I ran into Bill Lewis, a genuine construction worker who used to hang around the SUPA office, particularly when the resident den mother happened to be there. He was an organizer for a tiny socialist group that had just started up in Toronto, as a branch of the Vancouver based Progressive Workers Movement. He was also a bit of an anomaly among the radical socialist organizations in those days, at least in North America, since he was a real worker who packed his own tools from one job site to another. He and his friend, the leader of this little group, then spent the next few weeks convincing me that I should leave behind all the humanists, anarchists and pacifists in order to join their much tougher socialist outfit.

The local leader was in fact an American war resister, who actually turned out to belong to a rather similar outfit from the USA, the Progressive Labor Party (PLP). But it seems that his real job was to turn the Toronto group into an affiliate of the American organization, which task he soon accomplished quite well. This, however, did not go down very well with many of the Canadian nationalists who also belonged to the same association.

Originally, back in the nineteenth century, most of the socialist and anarchist parties and unions in the world had belonged to the First International (1864-1876), or Workingmen’s Association, the anarchists soon leaving to found their own movement. A few years later, the Second International (1889-1919) reunited most of the socialists, even though they tended to separate into either a moderate majority or a revolutionary minority. Their organizational unity was shattered, however, by the nationalist divisions of the First World War, the revolutionary faction then leaving to found the Third, or Communist, International (1919-1943). After the Second World War, the old Second International was reconstructed as a worldwide vehicle for the democratic socialists, again competing with the communists for support from the working class.

By the time that I was ready to become a socialist myself the two rival sections of the old left had come under attack by a nebulous collection of new leftists, itself divided up into separate ideological strains. Some of them were intellectual anarchists like the ones I mentioned earlier, who initially had a considerable influence on groups like SUPA. Most of the others were in fact hippies from the peace and love generation, vaguely opposed to capitalism and imperialism but not quite sure what to propose instead. The more extreme new leftists joined either the Trotskyite or the Maoist movements, trying to revive some of the fervor of the original communist parties from the 1920s, which had later been ossified or bureaucratized by the official communist countries.

One of the sources I used recently to prod my memory of those events was an autobiography published several decades later by Jack Scott, the founder of the aforementioned Progressive Workers Movement, who had spent most of his life heavily involved in organizing leftwing unions. His book is a fascinating source of information about how some of the people in the old left and the new left felt about what they were attempting to do in those days. In his autobiography, he referred briefly to the PLP’s successful raid on his Toronto chapter, as well as to another leftist splinter that quit the main body later on. Even though all those rival outfits kept on dividing up into smaller and smaller factions, they were all nevertheless dedicated to some kind of socialism, most of them also wanting to simultaneously free Canada from the American economic empire.

Back then, when I was working at a small warehouse, my socialist friends wanted me to try getting a few of my fellow workers to join their organization. However, the only thing I ever succeeded in doing was getting all of them quite alienated with me, especially when I took the Arab side during the Six Day War. That war, however, did encourage me to read a few books denouncing Zionism, the best of them having been written by Jewish authors: Moshe Menuhin’s The Decline of Judaism in Our Time and Ben Hecht’s Perfidy. From my point of view, the usefulness of those books came especially from their denunciation of the official interpretation of Jewish reality, which had become generally proZionist since Israel was reestablished in 1948. Over the years, I gradually became more and more interested in such exposés, which is to say books and articles that try to show just how disgustingly corrupt people in power generally become, no matter which ideology they officially support.

Unfortunately for me, in those days I was only interested in reading exposés of establishment (pro capitalist) institutions, whereas I have since learned that the skeptical attitude toward power should be applied to all institutions, even anti establishment (or theoretically anti capitalist) ones. Like many other leftists, I wanted to denounce Israel because it was supposed to have been a clean, egalitarian alternative to Nazi infamy, and it had turned out to behave just like any other colonial power. But I was not yet ready to apply the same critical interpretation to any of the officially socialist or communist countries, which put just as much distance between their own theory and practice as Israel ever did. Not to mention the same kind of hypocrisy taking place among Israel’s supposedly anti imperialist neighbors.

This might be a good place to recall that the division of modern politics into the left and the right in fact dates from the French Revolution. Purely by accident, the elected representatives in the first National Assembly who temporarily supported the monarch happened to be seated to the right of the king, while those who hated him happened to be seated on the left. As Eric Hoffer pointed out, however, since that time both halves of the political spectrum share an equally stupid tendency to utterly believe in their own liberal (leftwing) or conservative (rightwing) ideologies, to the complete exclusion of everything else. More than two centuries later, supporters of Israel, for example, think that anyone who criticizes the Jewish state for any reason whatsoever is necessarily antisemitic, whereas opponents of Israel think that anyone who criticizes any of Israel’s enemies for any reason at all just has to be an imperialist warmonger.

Most of the time, it was my job to go to our postoffice mailbox once a week and to take out all the copies of the socialist magazines that we had received from around the world. This gave me a chance to get a head start on the others, in following the democratic socialist countries as well as the communist countries through all the amazing twists and turns in their ideological history. Back then, the social democratic parties were still agonizing over whether or not they should repudiate nineteenth century Marxism altogether, because of the violent reputation of the communist, or MarxistLeninist, parties.

In those days, however, it was China that was going through the biggest changes. Like the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in the 1920s, the party in China in the 1960s and 1970s was divided up into warring factions. In the USSR, Nikolai Bukharin, the head of the liberal communist or revisionist faction, had adopted a point of view that was more like that of the democratic socialists than that of the other communists. He had initially been allied with Joseph Stalin, the head of the centrist faction in the party, against Leon Trotsky, the head of the ultra communist faction. After Trotsky was booted out of the party, Stalin had then turned on Bukharin and his allies, at the same time very cynically adopting most of Trotsky ally Yevgeny Preobrazhensky’s ultra communist program of forced industrialization. After Stalin’s death, however, the new Soviet factions oscillated between a much more liberal form of communism (revisionism again) and a more centrist approach, leaving official ultra communism to places like China and Albania.

In China during the 1960s, the Party initially attempted to present a united front of antiSoviet ultra communism. The party president at the time, Liu Zhao chi, was at first considered to be a great man, second only to the ultra revolutionary big boss, Mao Ze dong. I distinctly remember liking several passages in Liu’s book on How to be a Good Communist, before it became impossible to find a copy anywhere. Then Liu Zhao chi became a horrible revisionist just like the ones in Moscow, while army boss Lin Biao became number two. Then, Lin Biao became even worse than Liu Zhao chi, with Zhou En lei managing to hang on beside Mao right up to their unrelated deaths in 1976. This, in spite of the fact, as I found out later, that Zhou was the real leader of the pragmatists all along, and Deng Xiao ping (the eventual chief of postMaoist China) was his heir apparent. Since 1979, China has remained officially communist in form, but in fact has abandoned every kind of Marxism, adopting instead a weird combination of neoliberalism in some areas of policy and economic nationalism in others.

Back then, we were all convinced that socialism and communism really were what their founders had theoretically wanted them to be, namely the only practical hope for ridding the world of capitalism and the associated evils of class oppression, imperialism, fascism, frequent depressions, war, sexism and so on. We were all searching around for answers, trying to decide whether the social democratic countries like Sweden were doing the right thing by working within the capitalist system, or whether we had to support the much more radical communist countries. Most of us thought that social democracy was not going far enough, but that many of the communists were going too far.

However, a lot of people argued that the horrors committed by the leading communist countries, such as the several million people who died of famine in the USSR during forced collectivization (1928-1934), or the tens of millions who died in China during Mao’s so called Great Leap Forward (1958-1961), were complete fabrications dreamed up by pro capitalist historians. We contented ourselves with reading the works of the socialist and communist leaders instead, particularly the Fabian socialists from Great Britain, on the one hand, and the Cuban revolutionaries on the other. We tried not to gag at some of the more insipid pieces in those writings, such as many of Chairman Mao’s admonitions. “Where the broom does not sweep, the dirt will not go away by itself.”

Many of us ended up supporting the left wing of the NDP, or the revisionists in the USSR, or even the Trotskyites, who were quite adept in their virulent denunciations of communist excesses from the past. However, all the true believers, of whatever persuasion, accepted as absolute truth everything bad that anyone was willing to blame on the ideologies that they despised, but rejected out of hand anything bad about their chosen ideologies. None of us had any idea that socialism, whether democratic (social democracy) or revolutionary (communism), was never anything more than different varieties of state capitalism. In that system, public sector investors partly or completely replace private sector investors and proceed to commit all the very same evils, though sometimes to a lesser extent.

In any case, choosing socialism as a projected lifetime ideology was a lot easier to do during the 1960s than it has become several decades later. Back then, the different kinds of socialist theology were all the rage, enjoying a sort of second coming after a huge decline, at least in North America, during the McCarthy period of the 1950s. It was still possible then for millions of naive people to assume that the entire world would genuinely become either socialist or communist, very soon. We all thought that humanity could really do away with poverty altogether by eliminating plutocracy, which is to say the control of all the world’s resources by a few thousand multimillionaires. Today, unfortunately, the ultra rich are still running the world even more than before, and the only thing that has changed much is the complete bankruptcy of such impossible utopias as socialism or communism. Even nationalism is a lot less popular than it used to be.

In spite of all that, after leaving the radical movement, I never evolved into one of those ex socialists who suddenly decide to switch over to a form of ultra capitalism. Following the collapse of Maoism in China, the subsequent implosion of the Soviet Union and the worldwide decline of democratic socialism, I know several people who went through a road to Damascus conversion. They became as fanatical in their support of laissez faire capitalism as they once were fanatical in supporting one of the different forms of the socialist ideology. However, just because the socialist (reformist) or communist (state capitalist) system never worked properly is no reason to suddenly believe that the liberal capitalist (or libertarian) system works well either, even if it is sometimes tempered by economic nationalism or the welfare state. It seems to me nowadays that the only decent attitude to adopt is a general skepticism toward all systems of thought and action.

This is not to say that I now reject out of hand every part of collectivist doctrine. For example, I am convinced that Marx’s basic theory of surplus value is still quite useful, given the enormous, recent increases in the income gap between the social classes. As I explained earlier, it was only many years after it was all over that I found out that the decades between 1945 and 1975 were the only period of history in which that gap had declined a little. The fact that we have now returned to the old ways, by deliberately increasing the chasm between the classes as much as we possibly can, is one of the most unfortunate consequences of neoliberalism.

Marx’s idea was that the value, or material wealth, that leading investors are always underlining as their number one positive contribution to the economy, is in fact largely based on contributions made by the workers. Some have argued, however, that the workers would never have been able to create that wealth without the skilled artisans who invented the machines they operate, or even without the pro capitalist governments who have always supported that whole system. Still, the private investors themselves are not so much entrepreneurs as financial manipulators of capital, even more nowadays than they were back in the nineteenth century. They normally keep for themselves the profits arising from those investments, once salaries and other costs are deducted.

Orthodox economists like to describe this process as simply providing the service of bringing hired workers together with buildings and machines so that they can produce some sort of good or further service that will benefit many more people than the investors themselves. The world’s leading investors, however, are not interested in any benefits their investments may bring to lesser beings, what they really seek is to lord it over inferior people through increased profits and power. It is therefore no accident that the rosy picture painted by the economists deliberately ignores the absence of any equal opportunity. The vast majority of human beings simply do not have access to the kind of skills and dominant social situation necessary to make hundred million dollar decisions every day of their lives.

Those who do have those opportunities end up running the world, becoming the so called ruling class simply by virtue of controlling all the most important monetized social relations. The world’s major capitalists are not at all analogous to rich actors or sports professionals because they end up making most of the important decisions that affect the lives of every one of the seven billion people who currently inhabit this planet. Aside from large investors, operating either legally or illegally, the only other groups who qualify are those few government and institutional leaders who also make hundred million dollar decisions every day. The whole system is based on incredibly unequal opportunities to run the world. Those rulers qualify for that title even if the more thick headed among them refuse to acknowledge that they are indeed ruling.

But Marx was quite wrong when he claimed that the proletarian class would necessarily become good revolutionaries because they have no property and therefore have nothing to lose. In real life, reactionary and egotistical behavior is indeed a lot more common among the rich and the powerful than it is among the poor and the powerless. Unfortunately, this has never prevented millions of ordinary workers, even very militant ones, from themselves mistreating other even less powerful people through racism, sexism or some other such abomination. I have also found out over the years that this observation applies just as well to people from other oppressed groups, such as women, or children, or any of the world’s cultural, linguistic or ideological minorities. Some macho women, for example, cynically use the women’s liberation movement as a totally inappropriate weapon to help them impose their own egotistical will on those around them, occasionally surpassing macho men in egoism and depravity.

Even adolescent children and young adults are often capable of arrogantly manipulating their parents to do everything for them that they should be doing for themselves. Nowadays much more than before, millions of big babies in their twenties and thirties remain dependent on their parents, in a sadomasochistic relationship that mirrors the way that most multimillionaires treat everyone less fortunate than themselves. These young adults end up squatting for years in their parents homes, refusing to get their own apartments, and sitting around all day playing computer games and texting back and forth, while their parents work for a living, pay all the bills, and do all the housework. Many adult children who go to university make sure to take two or three times as long as it is normally supposed to take, in order to prolong their free lunch for as many years as possible. This is a totally unacceptable situation not only for those parents, but also for the millions of other young people who refuse to vegetate and who work as hard or harder than some of the parents do.

Unfortunately, toxic personalities are to be found inside every social division, the dominant groups being mainly, but not always, those with the most money and the most power. Some theoreticians have even postulated that both sadism and masochism in humans have their origins in animal behavior, people largely copying the kind of domination, and acquiescence to domination, that also takes place in some species of wolves and chimpanzees.

Back in my socialist days, almost half of our activities were centered on demonstrating against the war in Vietnam. At one of those demonstrations I therefore found myself in the middle of a large gathering of protesters outside the US consulate in Toronto. Those marches were organized by an umbrella assembly of leftists called the coordinating committee, which combined some of the more radical social democrats, Communist Party members, Trotskyites, and at least two different kinds of Maoists. It also included many other loosely organized, movement people zonked out on drugs and psychedelic counterculture.

As a result, instead of putting together several dozen different marches involving thirty to a couple of hundred people each, we all combined into one large demonstration of two to three thousand people. In other words, the coordinating committee was partly composed of people from the old left (the proMoscow communists and the NDP, aka the Canadian branch of the Socialist International) and partly composed of people from the different sections of the new left. All those different groups were obviously opposed to the US side in the Vietnam War, but they did not agree very much on anything else.

At one particular event in which I was involved, several protestors arrived in front of the consulate armed with an American flag, a can of lighter fluid and a box of matches. After marching around three or four times in front of the building, under the watchful eyes of several dozen city policemen, some of them on horseback, those demonstrators whipped out their equipment and started setting fire to the Stars and Stripes. Unfortunately, this unpatriotic act so infuriated one local police inspector that he promptly had several of us arrested and thrown into a conveniently located paddy wagon. It did not seem to have occurred to him at the time that burning an American flag was not really unpatriotic in Toronto, which was and is still a city in Canada. At that time, Canada also served on the International Control Commission, with India and Poland, to monitor the situation in the former French colonies of Indochina, including Vietnam, and was therefore supposed to be officially uninvolved in the war.

Standing off to one side watching our arrests by the police was one of our more active supporters. This guy was independently wealthy since his father had been a rich investor of some kind and he spent most of his time at the library doing research, or trying to reproduce famous scientific experiments in his basement. Once, he showed me a clever, fictional article that he had presumably written. The Carpenterites was about how all the leftist movements were always splitting up into smaller and smaller, rival organizations, or splinters, until finally only Mr and Mrs Carpenter were left. After that, as he put it, “divorce split their rank from their file”. In fact, we all spent more time fighting among ourselves than we did in organizing against capitalism, just like other people do whenever they are involved in any other kinds of belief, regardless of which brand of religion or ideology that they support. The usually slight differences between competing doctrines of the same general point of view are always considered much more important to true believers than they really are, religious fundamentalists behaving exactly the same way as political radicals.

I have often wondered if this very likable guy who watched us get arrested was in fact some sort of police agent, but since every paranoid leftist in those days thought that everyone else worked for the police, he was probably just an eccentric peacenik. The word peacenik was also used to describe all the antiwar protesters in those days, but of course many of the demonstrators were not really peaceniks, since they wanted the antiAmerican Vietnamese to win. Later on in court, the prosecution tried to argue that the activists were arrested because the burning US flag could have set fire to the flowers growing in the cement boxes that the city had installed in the median dividing the four lanes of traffic in front of the consulate. In the end, none of us were actually convicted of anything very serious.

After that, much of my time was spent on campus at one of the local universities, where I was often sent as a delegate to meetings of groups like the Toronto Student Movement. In my day, this was a kind of catchall assembly like the coordinating committee against the Vietnam War that included all kinds of leftist outfits. I also spent a lot of time selling radical socialist literature at a table we had set up in one of the university lobbies, and helping to produce our own little newspaper at night in the student pressroom. By this time, we had become a tiny branch of the PLP, that was officially called the Canadian Party of Labor (CPL). Our newspaper was focused on the plight of the working class and I wrote a large number of articles for it.

I stayed in that group for a few years, surviving several different faction fights. During that time, I ran into a large number of interesting people, including several visitors to Canada from such American organizations as the Student NonViolent Coordinating Committee, which initially included many white liberals who ended up supporting the black power movement. At one point, I remember getting very indignant after learning that an important black leader in the USA, Stokely Carmichael, had described a woman’s place in his movement as being prone. However, this was just a more extreme example of male chauvinism, which in those days was still rampant in most of those groups, in spite of their official proclamations favoring the liberation of all oppressed people.

One of the more interesting conversations I had was with Cheddi Jagan, a recently deposed leader of Guyana. His family and the people he represented were of East Indian origin and he had helped lead his community on the march to independence in alliance with other leaders, some of whom also represented the African origin population of that very peculiar South American country. Eventually, some of those African leaders were lured out of that coalition by the CIA and set up as pro American successors to the original alliance after the coup. Sitting together on the steps in front of one of the university pavilions, I remember asking this coup victim about his relationship with his wife, Janet. She was a longtime radical socialist from the USA, who became one of his associates in the party and government to which he belonged. This all came back to me many years later, when I read in the obituaries about how those same leaders had eventually been reelected in Guyana as part of a much more moderate administration several decades after the CIA coup.

I was quite interested in Guyana again at that time, because I had begun giving courses on the history of the third world. By talking about my conversations with Jagan, I was able to convey to my students the difficulties of many dozens of such leaders all over the world. They were prevented from making any long lasting improvements for their people during their periods as radicals, and were again unsuccessful later on, during their more reformist periods. Just like in industrialized countries, rejecting private capitalism altogether did not seem to work, but neither did trying to work within the system.

Other, bilingual, people that I met in those days even claimed to have contacted some of the members of the terrorist outfit, the Front de Libération du Québec (FLQ). Years later, I read that one of those members had been assassinated in Paris, ostensibly for unknown reasons. Given the fact that the FLQ was continually being infiltrated by the RCMP, I have often wondered whether any of the people I met could have been interacting at some point with the federal police force, disguised either as the assassins or as the victim. A long time after that assassination, it became the subject of a major controversy, a Toronto journalist, Michael McLoughlin, alleging in a book that it was carried out under direct orders from the Canadian government. The motive behind that killing was to prevent one of the members from telling everyone else about the police infiltration of their movement. Other former FLQ members, however, have denied that claim and described his book as pure fabrication.

During that period of my life, I got to know quite a few people from the old left, who had spent most of their lives in the socialist or the communist cause. One such person was a former textile worker with a finger missing from one hand. He enjoyed teaching everyone he met the lyrics that a bunch of anticlerical radicals had substituted for the real words to a number of Christmas carols, such as “Deck the halls with poison ivy”, and another song that started out with “The Virgin Mary, she’s the most; she’s been had by the Holy Ghost”. I also remember their spoof on a well-known store that offered cut-rate prices to poor people in Toronto: “Jesus buys his water walkers at good old Honest Ed’s; Jesus saves, Jesus saves, Jesus saves”.

To find out more about what the old left from the first half of the twentieth century had been doing, and why it seemed to have failed so miserably, I read a whole series of books written by organizers from the 1930s through to the 1960s. Many of them were social democrats from the League for Social Reconstruction, the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), and the New Democratic Party, while the others were radical socialists from the Industrial Workers of the World, the Communist Party and the Labor-Progressive Party. This included books like Kenneth McNaught’s A Prophet in Politics: A Biography of J. S. Woodsworth, the CCF’s Regina Manifesto (1932), Stanley Knowles’ The New Party, Fred Thompson’s The IWW: Its First Fifty Years, Ronny Liversedge’s history of the unemployed workers On-to-Ottawa Trek, the Reverend A. E. Smith’s All My Life, and the biography of the communist doctor Norman Bethune, The Scalpel The Sword, written by Ted Allen and Sydney Gordon. I ended up being better informed about the old left than most of the other socialists I knew.

Since both the moderate and the radical branches of the socialist movement were always trying to influence the working class, I also decided to read more than a few books about the history of the labor movement as well, in both Canada and the USA. During the same period, too, I bought several recordings of radical songs, both union songs and protest songs, including one record that was produced in East Germany but full of tunes sung by Paul Robeson and another American fellow traveler, Earl Robinson. In all those recordings, my particular favorites were among the radical union songs, many of which I memorized well enough to be able to sing several dozen verses over forty years later.

Another fascinating book that I read back then was Communism or Opportunism, by Fergus McKean, originally published in Canada in 1946. This was about how both the Canadian and the American Communist Parties had abandoned radical socialism during the 1940s, subscribing instead to a new form of social democracy, quite similar to that of the CCF. This was called Browderism at the time, named after the wartime head of the CPUSA (Earl K. Browder), which was otherwise known as “American exceptionalism”. Because of the liberal socialist communist alliance against fascism during the latter part of the Second World War, and the inclusion of socialist sympathizers like VicePresident Henry Wallace in the Roosevelt administration, most of the old leftists had come to believe that communism, socialism and democracy were really the same thing.

Many Canadians seemed to have agreed with them, notably in Saskatchewan, where the new CCF government (1944) promptly introduced North America’s first version of medicare, or socialized medicine. Voters in one urban riding in Quebec even elected the first communist member of the Canadian House of Commons, who only lasted two years before being booted out as a Soviet spy. According to one author, in British Columbia, the CCF and the communist front group, the Labor Progressive Party, briefly joined a coalition that could have been elected there too if the Liberal and Conservative parties had not formed their own rival coalition first. Rightwing populism, however, was even more successful, both BC and Alberta being dominated for several different terms, before and after the war, by local branches of the Social Credit movement. In spite of being elected over and over again, however, none of those ultraconservative governments ever managed to introduce any form of socialized credit.

Nevertheless, the theory of a democratic transition to socialism is not as stupid as it sounds since democracy itself cannot really work properly unless all the voters have an equal influence on the government. In practice, of course, the much less numerous rich people in every country are most often able to pay off, or lobby, government leaders successfully, so that they will not adopt legislation that is harmful to large scale investors. This sort of corruption happens constantly, especially when that legislation is originally intended to be beneficial to the much more numerous poor people, or middle income people, all over the globe.

In real life, political considerations ensure that no government can ever become genuinely democratic, or genuinely socialist or communist, all countries having always been governed by dominant social classes. Even in the ostensibly communist countries, government bureaucrats never at any time let any truly working class elements get anywhere near state power. In the USA and Canada, the Browderites and their social democratic friends very naively thought that every part of North America would spontaneously become more and more socialist over the years, without requiring any major upheaval. Instead, when the anti socialist and anti communist period of McCarthyism erupted in the postwar decade, they were completely unprepared and simply fell apart, especially in the USA.

At the time, my individual contacts with older socialists and communists, and my readings of leftwing and union history only underlined to me how important it was to remain a radical myself. In those days, I was totally unable to adopt the attitude that I have now, namely that democracy, socialism and communism are all impossible utopias. So are all the other ego projections that have been thought up over the years by the founders of every other religion and ideology in the universe. In the real world, ideals like democracy and socialism are often treated as opposites but in fact they have always been just so many political slogans. Those slogans are continually used by unscrupulous manipulators, otherwise known as leaders, to control other people’s minds. Unfortunately, like millions of other people, I was condemned to spend the next several decades transferring from one ideology to another, as a true believer or fanatic in whatever secular religions happened to come my way.

One of the antiwar demonstrations I attended was in Montreal, when we were trying to “take Vietnam to Expo”, though the protest itself took place a long way from the exhibition grounds. I managed to visit the international exhibition site a few times, going to the Cuban pavilion in particular to find out more about the revolution but also because it was one of the few pavilions that did not have three or four hour lineups in front of it. Quite often nowadays I still go down to visit the old Expo 67 site to see the very few things that are still standing, such as the Biosphere (the old American pavilion) and the administration building (the old Canadian pavilion). Unfortunately, Expo’s main legacy seems to be mostly tied to barbarian culture, since the French pavilion was turned into the Montreal casino and the monorail was replaced by a Formula One racetrack. My next visit to Montreal was to attend the 1968 Hemispheric Conference to End the Vietnam War, jointly organized by all the official communist parties in the Americas, but open to all sorts of people from various rival organizations.

In those days, the leftwing groups in Toronto were like miniature versions of the United Nations, attracting not only people whose families had been living in Canada for generations, but also recent immigrants from all over the world. Practically every ethnic origin on the planet was represented in those radical movements. Many of the immigrants were in fact draft dodgers from the USA, one of whom used to team up with me at parties to sing a duet imitating the Everly Brothers “Bye, bye love”. A large percentage of those draft dodgers were also Jewish Americans, including a guy who was everyone’s favorite Marxist intellectual. He was the only person around who could have appreciated receiving Marx’s very abstruse book Grundrisse (ground rent) as a birthday gift.

Some of the other people that I met were from the peace and love crowd. As Doug Owram explained in his book, Born at the Right Time: A History of the Baby Boom Generation, they had initially become activists during an ongoing confrontation between the hippies in the Yorkville district and the Toronto city administration. According to Owram, many of the same people later got involved in some of the antiwar marches at the time, a point that is also underlined in Stuart Henderson’s PhD thesis, “Making the Scene: Yorkville and Hip Toronto, 1960-1970”.

A lot of paranoid leftists at the time suspected that several of those hippies may have been police agents, since a few of them were also organizers for the government sponsored Company of Young Canadians (CYC), modeled after the US Peace Corps. Some of those leftists even accused the CYC of being behind the large scale distribution of illegal drugs from a new building near Yorkville called Rochdale College. The Henderson thesis also includes quotes from a few people I had already met at the peace center, several of whom belonged to militant groups like the Voice of Women. Some of his sources mentioned that a few Quebec members of the CYC later participated in setting up different versions of the radical socialist ideology in that province, a couple of them eventually becoming active members of the Quebec sovereignty movement.

Other influential people that I met included another fellow who was well known in the arts community in Toronto, at one point becoming the editor in chief of a ritzy arts publication. Our friends in the arts community also included Milton Acorn, who styled himself as the people’s poet and who went on to win several literary prizes for his populist style and stridently Canadian nationalist content.

For awhile, our most active members in Montreal belonged to the anglophone student radical movement. Back then, the only Québécois members in Montreal were a union activist and another young guy who has since become a civil servant, but they did not always get along very well with our anglophone members. Another Montreal contact from those days knew quite a bit about Iran and later convinced a lot of other radicals to support the 1979 Islamic revolution, at least initially. Unfortunately, that event merely replaced one horrible, totalitarian regime with another one that was slightly better in some respects, but much worse in others.

People from the States had a considerable impact on my life in those days, since the Canadian leftist movements were always so much smaller than the American ones. During my period as a radical socialist, I visited the USA on several occasions for political reasons, going most of the time to New York City. I remember joining some of the antiwar protests in that city, marching along with the PLP contingent. On one of those demonstrations, members of the Puerto Rican independence movement apparently started shooting it out with the local police force, leaving everyone else milling around and diving for cover. None of the bullets actually hit anyone, however, so we all got through that march “peacefully”.

Meanwhile, back in Toronto, we were still trying to convince Canadian workers to embrace our version of the radical socialist viewpoint. One of our sympathizers was a truck driver belonging to the Teamsters union. He and his family lived in a rundown section of the city called Cabbagetown, which has since become a hangout for upper middle class artists and intellectuals. In those days, however, it was still a very poor neighborhood, where he and his wife lived in a one room shack with a dirt floor, several children and a large kitchen stove providing all the available heat. The sleeping and eating quarters were only separated by a blanket suspended on a rope. It looked like it had come right out of an illustration for Friedrich Engels book on the conditions of the working class in England, published back in 1845.

In any case, he convinced me to find a job with a trucking company that had a huge loading dock, with dozens of different doors on it. My job, during the night, was to sort out and unload all kinds of mixed merchandise from the highway trucks coming in, so that the next morning the city trucks could take their loads to their appropriate destinations. As part of that job, I became a member of one of the Teamsters locals and promptly got myself embroiled in their internal politics. This was a group of drivers and warehouse workers that only a short time before had been involved in a violent strike. Most of their leaders were very conservative people but that particular local also boasted a small caucus of assorted leftists. I started chumming around with one particular driver and NDP supporter, a gentle diplomat who printed his own local news sheet and tried to keep both the left wingers and the right wingers working together.

On several occasions, I invited him along to help picket at different strikes that our group was interested in supporting, such as one that had been organized by an allCanadian union. At one point, he and I found ourselves all alone on the picket line, face to face with a group of scabs who would have liked nothing better than to pound us out, but he managed to talk us out of that confrontation. In those days, quite a few different leftist outfits, most of them from the student movement, used to spend a great deal of time running around from place to place to help strikers picket their companies. We even organized bus rides to various little towns around Toronto, traveling for hours on end to increase the noise level outside several factories in the rural towns within driving distance of the big city. Our visits did not please the Ontario Provincial Police whatsoever, but may occasionally have helped several different unions win their battles.

One of the issues of our newspaper led off with a political cartoon denouncing Dan Heap,  a worker priest who was also trying to help the same strikers from the allCanadian union that I mentioned earlier, but in a conciliatory way. Our cartoon tried to show this social democrat gradually transforming himself from a worker priest into a foreman priest and eventually into a management priest. We were upset by his advice to the workers, for seeking a negotiated solution to the conflict, no matter what the outcome. He later went on to become a long lasting MP, or member of the Canadian parliament, for the NDP.

Eventually, the rightwing leadership of the union I was in started investigating radical activities inside the local. I was dumb enough to tell a few unreliable people some of the things that I had heard about the leftist caucus inside that same local. As a result, I was obliged to testify as a witness in front of a meeting of several dozen angry union members, but I managed to survive that meeting without being beaten to a pulp. Nevertheless, that incident brought an end to my short lived membership in that particular union.

We had a few hippie members in our group back then, including one guy who used to work in a local head shop selling drug related and psychedelic goods. Most hippy people, however, could not bother trying to reconcile their individualist lifestyles with the puritanical nature of orthodox socialism, so they never joined our group. I remember all this nowadays whenever I see anarchist or libertarian people wearing “Che” Guevara T-shirts, since Guevara himself, though not in the same branch of the radical socialist movement as we were, was even more rigid and uncompromising a socialist than we ever were. Even though the various kinds of radical groups were often allied with the hippies, such as in the antiVietnam war movement, we really represented very different ideologies. In some ways, the hippies had more in common with libertarian capitalism, since they were much more interested in individual freedoms (“sex, drugs and rock n roll”) than they were in the kind of puritanical social responsibilities that we were advocating.

The next place where I got a job was at a large textile factory employing mostly women workers. I was running the shipping department, while the women, mainly immigrant ladies from the West Indies, did all the production work. I often got invited to dances run by the various West Indian associations, where I was one of a few whites in a room full of black people from Jamaica, Barbados and many of the other Caribbean islands. This whole episode of my life ended, however, when I tried to organize the workers in the mill into an international (North American) union and ended up getting fired instead.

After that, I promptly got myself hired at another textile company across town. This time, we decided to call on a small, independent labor federation led by Kent Rowley and Madeleine Parent, two radical union organizers who had been run out of the province of Quebec by its anti socialist premier, Maurice Duplessis, back in the 1950s. Our success there meant that one of my friends and I were invited to the founding convention of an allCanadian confederation of unions, which however did not really become much of a success later on. This was during a period of intense Canadian nationalism, resulting in the election of Pierre Trudeau as an antiAmerican, but also antiQuebec separatist, prime minister of Canada. A number of people in the labor movement, which in Canada had long been dominated by American organizations, were then involved in trying to replace the international unions with Canadian ones. But that was not always very popular in the radical socialist movement that normally wanted to avoid nationalism altogether, whether it was of the American imperialist variety or the theoretically anti imperialist Canadian or Québécois varieties.

Our little group got all mixed up trying to debate the national question, which eventually resulted in a split within the party, one of my friends (Gary Perly) and a few others going on to found a rival leftwing, Canadian nationalist movement. Nevertheless, what was left of my group continued to support the founding of allCanadian unions in English Canada. However, we were simultaneously advising our Montreal members to oppose the founding of separatist Quebec unions that were also in the process of breaking away from the American internationals. So, in the language of the leftist outfits from that period, did that mean that we wanted Canadian imperialism to replace American imperialism, at least in Quebec?

In fact, we were simply tying ourselves up into a kind of ideological pretzel over nationalism, the same problem that has always beleaguered every other international point of view throughout history. As I found out later when I was involved in the Quebec sovereignty movement, even the Catholic church has also been immersed in the same sort of crises since its founding, at the beginning of the middle ages. Belonging to a catholic, or universal church, never seems to have prevented millions of people from being nationalists as well, notably in Quebec. Meanwhile, back in English Canada, several other fervently international socialist organizations also decided to become ardent supporters of the allCanadian union movement.

Another major event back then that affected my radical socialist outfit was the October crisis in Quebec, when the FLQ kidnapped a British diplomat and a Liberal minister (who was later killed) to support their terrorist drive for independence and socialism. Pierre Trudeau reacted to the apprehended insurrection that he alleged was being organized by the tiny FLQ by invoking the War Measures Act (WMA) all over Canada and calling out the army. In Toronto, the morning after the WMA was proclaimed a hastily assembled coalition of left-wing outfits showed up in front of City Hall and proceeded to defy the government by systematically advocating everything that the act had just declared illegal. 

The federal government, however, was only vaguely interested in what was happening in Toronto, or Vancouver, or even in the English speaking parts of Quebec. They only ever enforced that law in the overwhelmingly francophone parts of Quebec, especially with the late night arrest of almost 500 leftist militants, most of them never being charged with having committed any specific crime. Trudeau was promptly denounced for his completely undemocratic “nacht und nebel” (night and fog) operation against the Quebec sovereignty movement, some people even going so far as to wonder whether or not parts of the FLQ may have been under the control of the RCMP all along.

In any case, at least theoretically, Canada ceased for a time to be a democratic country, even officially, since the WMA, or a newer version of it, was on the books for the next ten years. I remember all that very well whenever I pass in front of the Trudeau monument in the Montreal suburb of Côte-Saint-Luc during my neighborhood walks nowadays. Paradoxically, Trudeau is described as a great Canadian democrat on that monument, which is located right next to another large display praising the efforts of various Canadian personalities who have defended fundamental human rights over the years. Presumably, the officials who erected that monument liked Trudeau because he was opposed to restrictive French language legislation in Quebec, as well as including a charter of rights in the 1982 Canadian constitution. In so doing, however, they conveniently forgot that his ferocious opposition to separatism often led him to use distinctly authoritarian methods.

About a year later, following the resignations of several other members, I left the CPL and began looking around for some other way of expressing my anti establishment sentiments. Since that time, I have often reflected on how I could ever have supported such a movement in the first place. To be sure, when I was in that little group, we were never involved in anything more violent than picket sign fights with proVietnam war demonstrators. In fact, I was the only person I know about who ever got physically hurt by those people. A couple of years after I had left that organization, a gang of them attacked me and several of my new friends from a rival collective that I had just joined. One of them hit me right between the eyes with a big black cane, I suppose as a kind of punishment for having dared to change sects.

Nevertheless, all the radical socialists were still associated in the popular imagination with immensely powerful communists, or state capitalists, who were largely responsible for the violent deaths of tens of millions of human beings. It was simply not enough to claim, as I wrote in an article published several years later, that both the fascist and the liberal varieties of capitalism had also killed millions of other people during the same period. The fascist states were easily the worst form of capitalism that ever existed, and not just because of the horrendous concentration camps. But the liberal empires also managed to eliminate their own millions of ordinary civilians, such as the Germans, the Japanese, the Koreans and the Vietnamese killed mostly by democratic Western airmen during several decades of carpet bombing.

At one point in my radical socialist days, I remember how intrigued I was to read that the most extreme state capitalist, Mao Ze dong, was not afraid of the Third World War. According to him the First World War had led to the victory of socialism in the USSR, the Second World War had led to the victory of socialism in many other places, including China, and the Third World War would probably result in a world wide victory for socialism. He apparently based his reasoning on the fact that most of the survivors of an EastWest nuclear exchange would probably be living in China, rather than anywhere else, by sheer weight of numbers.

In any case, I then spent more than a year as an independent leftist in Toronto. I wrote a few articles for Guerrilla, the local movement weekly newspaper, which is also mentioned in Owram’s book about the baby boom generation. The only thing I can remember about the contents of that hippy newspaper, however, was when it printed a full back page that received a lot of indignant attention. It was a huge drawing of “The Satanic Bitch Giving Birth to the Bastard Son of God” that accurately summed up the irreverent iconoclasm of alternative newspapers in the 1970s.

That was when one of my friends, who had also left the same little party a few months before me, called me up and proclaimed that he had finally found a much better way of promoting socialism. He enthusiastically recommended that I start reading the works of the intellectual leader of the Labor Committees, one of the Students for a Democratic Society spinoff organizations in the USA. It turns out that this very peculiar leftist, who called himself Lyn Marcus, was an ex production manager, busily organizing his own international selection of obedient intellectuals, in preparation for some future upheaval. After having read a ton of material from that group, I shortly became almost as enthusiastic as my friend and we set up a meeting during which Marcus was scheduled to address militants from all the other denominations within the new left. We introduced him to about 200 people gathered together in a room at the University of Toronto, the presence of that many people being explained by the very unusual nature of our guest speaker.

Today, several decades later, I am still trying to figure out who this fellow really was. All the rival leftist outfits firmly believed that he was a CIA or FBI operative, whose goal it was to thoroughly discredit the radical socialist movement in North America, which was not really popular enough to require a great deal of discrediting. In any case, all the leftists were always thinking that everyone else in the movement was an agent, so this explanation was not very helpful. Other sources that I read since then seem to think that Marcus was in fact controlled by the East German spy network, the “Stasi”.

A highly intelligent A-type personality, his grasp of difficult to analyze events and concepts was more clever and sophisticated than that of any of the other North American anti capitalists. His father had apparently been involved in some evangelical religion, which probably had a lot of influence on his own fanaticism. He was also a somewhat unusual leftist for another reason since, like Mussolini several decades earlier, he started developing his own version of the radical socialist ideology during the 1960s and 1970s, but later decided to switch over to a radical rightwing ideology during the 1980s. When he was still calling himself a socialist, however, he proclaimed that all his followers should not just be reading the usual Marxist classics, but that they should also be well versed in some of the less well known writings, such as those of Rosa Luxembourg and Antonio Gramsci.

This admonition led me to read Luxembourg’s main work on The Accumulation of Capital (1913), which certainly seemed to me to be more perspicacious than anything written back then by her socialist rivals. The description she gave in that book of Egypt’s nineteenth century financial dealings with British and French bankers is quite adept at underlining how much greater rates of profit can be attained through rediscounted debt than through industrial production. Another book that I read during that period was JP Nettl’s biography of Luxembourg. I found the last part of the book particularly interesting, when she and her companion Karl Liebknecht were beaten to death by soldiers from the Freikorps, officially demobilized veterans from the First World War. What fascinated me about that story was the fact that millions of those soldiers, on both sides, had all been so much cannon fodder for the various empires belonging mostly to rich investors who were profiting from the war.

This made me think about other accounts that I had also read, particularly one source that had quoted the American steel millionaire, Henry Clay Flick, as saying that he won his battles with workers on strike because he could usually get one half of the working class (the scabs) to beat up the other half (the strikers). In other words, whenever some group of oppressed people try to better their position, the people in power normally succeed in dividing and conquering. Since that time, I have also figured out that whether the people in power belong to the old collection of oppressors, such as the private capitalists, or some new gang of oppressors, such as the state capitalists, seldom seems to make any difference to the overall outcome. Though I did not know that at the time, I have since discovered that most of the reformists and revolutionaries who manage to take power away from their predecessors, and keep it for any length of time, inevitably betray their causes later on.

Back then, among the things that got my friend and me enthusiastic about this new formation was an article that Marcus had written about socialism as a centrist ideology, in which he lambasted all socialist and communist movements since Marx as being divided into a maximum program and a minimum program. The maximum program was their pie in the sky call for a worldwide working class takeover and the minimum program was their day to day support of much more mundane things such as workers demands for shorter hours and higher pay. He compared this centrism with the activities of most Christians, who get really emotional about supporting God on Sundays, but who then spend the other six days of the week serving Mammon instead. His little international socialist caucus was supposed to become the first Marxist group that would support the maximum program all the time.

As it turned out, I spent a couple of years being associated with the Toronto chapter of one of his front groups. Unfortunately for the hundreds of people who participated in that outfit over the years, in western Europe as well as in North America, it was like most other leftist movements in going through periodic crises and witch hunts. Marcus, like any other sectarian leader, could not bear having anyone else become popular within his little outfit, and spent a great deal of time brow-beating his senior members and expelling anyone who continued to disagree with him about anything. All this infighting meant that we were subjected to vicious ego stripping sessions based on a magazine article he wrote. In each one of the local branches, everyone spent hundreds of hours criticizing everyone else, and commenting on how so and so was blocking because he or she showed some reluctance to get fully involved in each and every one of the group’s activities. Getting into sadomasochistic debates with those people about which one of us was the most hung up, was a very debilitating experience.

It was without a doubt the most bizarre little gang in the entire history of the new left. Their leader, whose real name turned out to be Lyndon Larouche, was periodically attacked as a dangerous madman by many of the world’s most important newspapers, from both private capitalist and communist (state-capitalist) countries. Personally, I found several of the articles published in their monthly magazine quite enlightening. I did not know all that much in those days about the history of western civilization, the arts, the sciences, philosophy and religion, and ended up getting my first taste of some of that stuff from their publications. Years later, I found out that everything written in that magazine had been discovered and abundantly discussed long ago by hundreds of original thinkers. Still, this was certainly the only leftwing movement I knew about, that seemed to be interested in any kind of in depth analysis of anything at all.

I also remember traveling to Philadelphia for the annual meeting of an antipoverty alliance, trying to organize the unemployed and people on welfare. This was a thinly disguised attempt to take over a much larger welfare rights federation that had already been around for decades. Those left wingers had managed to infiltrate that movement, as well as one of the youth gangs that were operating down there at that time. The meeting was at a church inside a practically blacks only ghetto and we all had a great time trying to get our faction firmly installed in leadership positions within that assembly. Naturally, we had to contend with the opposition of several rival groups, such as the Reverend Jesse Jackson’s People United to Save Humanity (PUSH), which were all dismissed, perhaps paradoxically, as police organizations by the more radical leftists.

Things got really hectic during my last year with that sect, when they got involved in dozens of fights with various rival leftwing movements. That was when my friend who had first invited me to participate in that assembly, as well as a whole lot of other people, decided to leave the organization. In Canada, those of us who were left got into very few real fights, since we were not numerous enough to pick on anyone. However, the PWM’s Jack Scott claimed later on in his autobiography that another ultra leftwing outfit did get one of the Labor Committee members alone in Vancouver and beat him up very severely, but that was several years after I had quit.

I remember one particular intervention in Toronto during which we unsuccessfully tried to intervene into a class that was being given to a group of “Waffle” members at one of the local universities. The speaker was Andreas Papandreou, a Greek professor, the exiled leader of the Socialist Party and a future prime minister of Greece. In those days, the Waffle was a faction of leftwing nationalists who had quit the democratic socialist NDP after their chieftain had lost the race for national leader to David Lewis, who was then part of an unofficial coalition in the Canadian parliament with prime minister Trudeau.

A lot of our time as sympathizers, however, was also spent reading, since we were supposed to become experts on everything that Labor Committee members had ever written, which was in fact quite voluminous. In addition, we were expected to become familiar with the works of the most important authors from German critical philosophy and to know something about all the other writers, artists, composers and scientists from all over the world who had found favor with those intellectuals over the years. The scientists they liked the most were those who knew something about nuclear fusion, that we assumed would soon become an amazing new source of energy, rapidly replacing fossil fuels, solving the pollution problem forever and bringing about a new renaissance. However, this was just another chimera, since today, four decades later, there is still no fusion power, no obvious replacement for hydrocarbons and certainly no renaissance.

Larouche and his senior members also started publicly musing about a concept called negative entropy that they apparently borrowed from Soviet biochemist A. I. Oparin. Oparin, the author of a famous work on The Origin of Life, that I also read at the time, explained that living things must have violated the second law of thermodynamics when they came into being, a concept originally denounced, but later accepted, by most other scientists. For supporters of that point of view, this meant that all existence, whether physical, chemical, biological, sociological or psychological, is just the outcome of a kind of universal super-evolution, pitting the forces of entropy, or dissolution, against the forces of negative entropy (creation).

In the Soviet version, first there was the Big Bang, then an expanding and more complicated physical universe, then the development of biological evolution. This then led to the rise of thinking animals, then the development of human society through the tribal, slavery, feudal and capitalist systems, finishing with the rise of world socialism. In imitation of Hegel, the Labor Committees alleged that their version of this same theory was the apotheosis of world philosophy. During the final period of social evolution, all humans were supposed to become scientists and to develop the kind of technologies required to produce their own, new physical universes. To some people, this sounded a lot like a Marxist, or Darwinist, translation of the Christian battle between good and evil, culminating in the kingdom of heaven.

Recently, I heard a local astronomer describe the universe before the Big Bang as a perfect crystalline structure without mass, that then blew apart when an anomaly, or impurity, called the Higgs boson wormed its way in somehow. Everything material (with mass) that existed since then is supposed to be based on, and consistent with, that original event. An amusing way of looking at it may be that, fourteen billion years after the Big Bang, our society is so imperfect because the Higgs boson was not so much a God particle, as it is often described, but more like a Devil particle.

Other books that I read during that same period have since had quite an effect on my thinking. One of those was French sociologist Émile Durkheim’s book on the Elementary Forms of Religious Life, in which he discussed the social needs that are being satisfied by the world’s various religions. People’s adherence to them is not an individual choice but forms part of their participation in whichever historically and culturally determined society into which they were born, even when they switch religions later on in life. I now see that this description also applies to political religions like liberalism, conservatism, nationalism and socialism, not just to spiritual religions.

Another book was psychoanalyst Lawrence Kubie’s Neurotic Distortions of the Creative Process. Kubie pointed out that the artistic and scientific insights that creative people have come from a kind of preconscious organization of disparate bits of information within the brain. They do not proceed from deliberate attempts at solving problems using the scientific method, which ought to be used to separate real information from invented mythology after an insight takes place, but cannot replace the preconscious formation of such an insight.

The Labor Committees also spent a great deal of time and effort in doing intelligence, by which they meant unearthing hundreds of sordid details about the very corrupt ways in which most countries are run. Part of their focus was on how such radical collectives as the Red Brigades in Italy and the Baader Meinhof terrorists in Germany were not really Marxist groups at all, but counter gangs organized by spy agencies to control the larger political forces in those countries.

It seems that they borrowed this particular concept from British brigadier-general Frank Kitson, who published a book in 1960 called Gangs and Counter Gangs. In his book, Kitson explained how he fought against the Mau-Mau independence movement in Kenya during the 1950s by creating an artificial Mau-Mau, under his control, which apparently gained credibility by killing white settlers just like the real one did. According to him, this was done to justify sending in a much larger group of British soldiers to quell the rebellion than those that the reluctant imperial government was originally disposed to send.

The same concept was also used against many other revolutionary factions all over the world, including the Provisional IRA in Northern Ireland, where general Kitson apparently ran British Army operations during the early years of the Troubles. This probably means that the Provos were therefore just another counter-gang, at least at first. Kitson’s other major work, on low intensity operations (1971), referred to several other military interventions, such as one that targeted the Malayan communist rebellion of the 1950s. Later, Kitson also participated in the Falkland Islands war against Argentina in 1982, after which he became Queen Elizabeth’s general aide-de-camp (1983-1985).

Many people have since speculated that the same counter gang gambit had probably been used in the Canadian government’s counterinsurgency assault on the Quebec independence movement. This would have meant that every one of the separatist groups, including the terrorist FLQ and the elected PQ party, had all been infiltrated by the federal police (RCMP). The October crisis of 1970, provoked by the FLQ, certainly gave prime minister Trudeau the excuse he needed to call in the Canadian army. This idea never occurred to me at the time, but what if the entire battle between the federalists and the sovereignty people was nothing but a controlled environment, with the federal government in fact running the entire circus from beginning to end?

Be that as it may, I found out several decades later on the internet that Kitson’s work was just part of a long history of various false flag, black, covert or underground counter-intelligence efforts. Those operations have been carried out by all sorts of armies and governments, in every imaginable country, throughout history but especially during the cold war. Other sources since that time have also used similar reasoning to accuse the UNITA movement in Angola, and the RENAMO group in Mozambique, of having been set up with (white) South African and American help in order to weaken the proSoviet governments of those countries in extremely violent civil wars. More recently, similar accusations were also made about the Pakistani intelligence agency setting up the Taliban movement in Afghanistan. Other sources have denounced the CIA too for the same reason, since curiously it has not always been as efficient in the war on terror as it ought to have been, considering the enormous amounts of money that it was spending.

The Larouche group mostly used Kitson’s counter-gang concept to bolster several of the conspiracy theories that they were always concocting. The most famous of their theories was the one about the alleged connections between the international drug trade and the British royal family, originally described in one of the more popular books that they published at the time. Other books that I read during the same period, written by James Clavell, connected the most important British investors in Hong Kong with the opium trade and the heroin trade, but had nothing at all to say about any royal family connections. Even though those books were novels, they were so well researched that anyone knowing anything about the history of Hong Kong could easily figure out to which trading companies and banks he was referring.

According to yet another source that I read back then, Zhou En lei apparently told Egypt’s Nasser in 1969 that China had deliberately sold illegal drugs to American soldiers during the Vietnam War. It could turn out that dozens of different conspirators, public and private, have been using such drugs as weapons for centuries. But the possibility that many political groups all over the world may in fact have been at least part of the time under the influence of various intelligence agencies certainly seems to have caught on, and the Labor Committees could very well have been one of its many manifestations.

Another historical event that has spawned a number of other conspiracy theories over the years was the 1942 raid on Dieppe in France, then occupied by the German Army and attacked largely by Allied soldiers from different parts of Canada. That massacre has been denounced as a deliberate sacrifice of colonial lives, in order to prove to Stalin that the Western front was not ready to be reopened at that time. Other such theories from the Second World War include the alleged British attempt to deliberately worsen a large famine in Bengal in order to punish some of the local Congress Party nationalists who were then supporting the Japanese, not only politically but also militarily. Some people have also postulated that western politicians deliberately postponed the 1944 invasion of Normandy so that the Germans and the Russians could kill each other off on the eastern front. This strategy was presumed to have fulfilled the heartland theory of the British founder of geopolitics, Halford Mackinder, first developed back in the opening years of the twentieth century.

Many more such conspiracy theories were also developed to explain specific events taking place during the cold war. For example, some sources have claimed that the communist parties in France, Italy and Canada lost a lot of their influence in the union movement as a result of joint efforts undertaken by a devil’s coalition including the CIA, organized crime and several well known politicians from the democratic socialist parties, who hated the communists as much as anyone else. Faction fighting inside the Catholic church has also become the object of several other such theories, including the alleged assassination of Pope John Paul I. In any case, concerned citizens nowadays should not be dismissing all those conspiracy theories out of hand, without trying to find out what is or was really going on.

Just because some disturbed people believe in all kinds of weird things, including the absurd myth that the Americans never really sent anyone to the Moon, does not mean that all the other conspiracies never really happened. Quite a few other plausible theories also exist about many other recent events, which are not as totally outlandish as the ones that are always being denounced in the media by professional naysayers. In the courses that I gave over the past thirty years or so, I often included the counter gang concept and other similar conspiracies to point out to my students that in politics, things are not always what most people normally assume them to be.

The best contribution of the Labor Committees to this debate may turn out to be that even some of the false conspiracy theories are also simultaneously real in the very special sense that they still succeed in leading many people even further away from the truth. Conspiracies, after all, have been around forever, like the Catholic church’s thousand-year old fake document, contending that the fourth century Roman emperor Constantine gave control of world Christianity to the pope. Apparently, the church only admitted that document, The Donation of Constantine, to be a fake during John Paul II’s reign.

Back in the 1970s, my biggest personal involvement in that very peculiar group’s activities in Canada was during an attempt to gain political mileage at one of the NDP conventions. All our Canadian sympathizers, along with several other members shipped in from nearby US cities, were sent to sell our literature and try to convince the social democrats to become real socialists just like us. After that, the Larouche outfit seemed more interested in what was going on in Canada than they had been before. I went down to New York for one of their conventions and managed to speak to several of their leading members about the Canadian situation.

However, when I expressed reluctance to continue my activities with the group because it was becoming so psychologically difficult, they arranged to have me talk with another one of their leading honchos. This guy tried to convince me to overcome my shortcomings in the same way that he had. In fact, he was almost blind and wore the thickest pair of glasses I have ever seen, but according to him his “reading problem” was probably psychosomatic, caused by his own fear of organizing.

During the convention that I attended, those people became increasingly paranoid, which is saying quite a lot in their case. Not only were nefarious intelligence agencies from various different countries out to get them, but their enemies had already succeeded in capturing and brainwashing one of their leading members in Europe. Supporters who were in New York at the time were all supposed to listen to tape recordings made after this fellow had been rescued by his comrades and was in the process of being deprogrammed. All the members were running around in several floors of the downtown office building that served as their headquarters making as if they really believed that they were under attack by the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderberger Society, or some other horribly powerful international conspiracy run by none other than Henry Kissinger.

The extreme delirium of that convention led me to decide to get those people out of my life, once and for all, before it was too late for my own mental stability. However, just like I had done after leaving my previous affiliation, I again avoided any sudden conversion. Leaving behind what was left of that gang did not mean for me what it meant for several other people, who instantly became great friends of that group’s worst enemies. I did not, for example, start proclaiming that Henry Kissinger was in fact a much nicer person than they were, like some other ex associates apparently did. In reality, although those people could easily have turned out even worse than some of their enemies, if they had ever succeeded in getting any real power, it was still the people in power who were worse. The leaders of the “free world”, after all, as well as the leaders of the so called communist countries, were very powerful people in those days. All of them were certainly responsible, directly or indirectly, for killing many more human beings during the cold war than any of the tiny radical socialist factions ever could.

Back then, however, I had no idea exactly what was going on within that small, self contained organization during that convention, and I still do not know much more even nowadays. As for myself, I went back to Toronto firmly resolved to immediately break all my ties to that very strange group of people. I then decided that the only way out for me was to try and get as far away from them as possible. So I tried to think of some half decent place that I could go live in, which did not at that time have a branch of that organization operating there. That was when I decided to move to Montreal and to see where that would lead me, taking all my meager belongings in one tiny suitcase. Now, several decades later, I am still living in Montreal, as it turned out for a longer time than I ever lived anywhere else.