Doctoral and post-doctoral blues

Because of the nature of my topic, the first part of the doctoral program involved taking master’s level courses in economics and in sociology, so that I could use information from both of those disciplines during the writing of what turned out to be a 400 page thesis. I therefore took a course on the history of economic thought from Gilles Dostaler, the economics professor that I mentioned earlier, a prolific writer on the subject who went on to become one of the members of my thesis committee. Unfortunately, he died at what was still a relatively young age several years after my thesis was accepted. His death received a great deal of attention all over the world because his books on the lives and the contributions of several important economists were very much appreciated in that field.

My other course was on the epistemology of the social sciences, given by a well known sociology professor. I would meet him again several years later when he was a member of the provincial government commission set up to evaluate college level teaching programs. Meanwhile, my thesis committee provided me with a list of a couple of hundred books that had to be read in areas that were pertinent to my research topic. This included a lot of material on Canadian political history in the nineteenth century, many more books on the history of economic thought, such as Joseph Schumpeter’s monumental History of Economic Analysis, and a number of works about structural archetypes used in the epistemology of knowledge.

That was also when I started writing articles for L’Analyste, a prestigious new Quebec magazine. This was put out by a group of people who were definitely more federalist than separatist, as well as being in favor of free enterprise taking over full control of world economic policy. In reality, it was a rather peculiar magazine in which for me to get involved, since its main editorial positions were diametrically opposed to my own beliefs. I had, after all, left the PQ precisely because I thought that they were switching over to the Thatcher-Reagan point of view. Most of the people on the editorial board of that magazine in fact supported the same neoliberal doctrine that I had already targeted in the articles that I wrote when I was an active nationalist. I would condemn that same doctrine again in the books that I published later on, after I abandoned partisan politics.

As I pointed out earlier, neoliberalism is nothing more than an updated version of the original economic liberalism that was first expounded back in the eighteenth century by Mandeville and Smith. According to this approach, the private vices of free enterprise become public virtues, “as if by an invisible hand”, so long as no external forces, such as governments or trade unions, manage to gum up the works. During the past couple of centuries this well worn idea has been greatly enlarged and radicalized so as to become a universal ideology of unfettered individualism or libertarianism, to be applied whenever any sociopath feels like justifying any particularly odious egotistical decision. Since Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and Helmut Kohl made this ideology popular during the 1980s, it has gradually become the favorite excuse of every ultra rich financial speculator, every horrendously overpaid money manager and every feral politician trying his best to follow the so called Haitian model by eliminating the middle class altogether.

At first, I thought that anything positive I might want to write for that particular magazine about government intervention into the economy would be rejected outright. So I was rather surprised when they published an article in which I tried to show that the whole idea of pitting the state against private enterprise was, after all, a false debate. Instead, I developed the point that in order to sustain a modern economy both those institutions had to be in some sort of partnership, each with its own particular role. This started a row among the magazine’s editors, between those who felt that my interpretation needed to be aired and those who felt that their magazine should never have published my article. My approach was duly attacked in the succeeding issue by a retired journalist who had worked for several decades for one of Montreal’s dailies.

Nevertheless, right up until the magazine folded several years later I continued getting quite a few articles and book reviews published. During the mid 1980s, I also attended the same magazine’s conference on nationalism, held at a hotel in the Laurentian mountains. Those attending the conference included such people as Marc Lalonde, a federal finance minister who favored giving tax breaks to important investors, and Pierre-Karl Péladeau, a leading investor who  was in the process of taking over his father’s very profitable publishing business. None of those people really wanted “free enterprise” to put an end to government subsides to business interests. After the conference, the magazine appropriately published a two part series that I wrote on the history of economic nationalism in Quebec. In those articles, I pointed out that in Quebec, as in every other country in the modern world, neither the state nor private enterprise has ever managed to stand entirely alone, not even in the so called communist countries.

One of my book reviews for the same magazine was about Anna Bramwell’s Ecology in the 20^th century: A history, in which she emphasized the importance of Hitler’s agriculture minister in the early development of ecology as a political ideology. I was quite intrigued by her description of the reactionary arcadian aspect of that doctrine, namely the pretension that subsistence agriculture was based on some kind of magical Tolkien communion with nature. In reality, human beings had started transforming the natural world long before agriculture came on the scene, meaning that by that time in many parts of the biosphere, “nature” had been coexisting with human nature for eons.

In other articles, I also wrote about various other historical events, such as the role of the debate between the pro American comprador bourgeoisie and the anti American national bourgeoisie, in the Mexican elections of the 1980s. This was the period when Mexico switched over from an economic nationalist point of view to a neoliberal one. The difference between the two factions in economic policy, however, did not have any influence on their common attitude toward the general population, since both groups were equally authoritarian in spite of operating in a theoretically democratic country.

My contributions also included other book reviews, including one about Henry Milner’s Sweden: Social Democracy in Practice, in which he described Swedish social democracy as leftwing corporatism, or what more orthodox Marxists would have called class collaboration. Another review, that the magazine editors appropriately entitled, “The geopolitics of dominated countries”, was about Edem Kodjo’s L’Occident: du déclin au défi. Kodjo’s point was that in order to avoid ongoing western economic domination, third world countries needed to adopt the Japanese model, fighting foreign control through intense cooperation between the state and private enterprise. That book was published before it became apparent that the main Japanese investors had left behind nation building and started on their own orgy of speculative investment.

Still another book review that I wrote for that magazine was about Toronto historian James Bacque’s Other Losses: An Investigation into the Mass Deaths of German Prisoners of War after World War II. This was an attempt to use American sources in order to prove that the American and French armies had allowed a million German soldiers to die from exposure and malnutrition in various prisoner of war camps in western Europe after the German defeat. Several other magazines and newspapers had already heaped a lot of scorn on that idea. I, however, took the view that many thousands (rather than a million) of former soldiers had probably died in this way, this type of attitude being totally consistent with everything that I had so far read on that period. Even today, one of the best such sources is still Guy Wint and Peter Calvocoressi’s Total War, published back in 1979, which consistently emphasizes how very totalitarian all the participants in that war really were, regardless of their official ideological stance.

One of my final contributions to that magazine was an article about the newly imposed  junior college course on the history of western civilization. In that article, I tried to show that anyone teaching that course should emphasize the fact that the western form of urban based civilization often used racist violence and mass destruction in order to dominate the rest of the world from the sixteenth century onward. Nevertheless, the other competing civilizations were by no means blameless and were every bit as willing to use similar methods against their own rivals. As I put it then, the best way to avoid racism while teaching history is to denounce everyone, at least on moral grounds, while still emphasizing how much more destructive dominant groups usually are than their less powerful rivals.

At about the same time, the Quebec sovereignty movement started getting interesting again. A large number of radical nationalists had left the Parti Québécois when premier Lévesque imposed his “beau risque” strategy, supporting the asymmetric federalism of Brian Mulroney, who had become the new Conservative prime minister of Canada. Most of those radicals started a new group, the “Rassemblement démocratique pour l’indépendance”, that I supported for a short time, once again trying to get them to accept some of my own ideas about economic nationalism. My efforts, however, were not any more successful in that little outfit than they had been inside the PQ. A couple of years later, I also did not get very much further inside the much larger Mouvement national des patriotes, a sort of umbrella organization for all the nationalist factions that was then being run by Sylvain Simard, who eventually became a PQ minister.

Meanwhile, inside the PQ, division within the ranks meant that Lévesque’s confederate strategy fell apart, leading to his resignation as premier and as party leader. With the Liberals back in power, Lévesque’s former finance minister, Jacques Parizeau, managed to convince most of the radicals to go back into the Parti Québécois with him. Some of the people in the Parizeau group wanted to turn the PQ into a pure independence party, officially dropping the sovereignty-association gambit that had been associated with Lévesque and his faction. A few of them even favored the idea of setting up a separate currency for Quebec if a future referendum was successful.

Pure or hard independence, however, has always been considerably less popular in Quebec than the sovereignty association idea. This was proved once again several years later, in 1994, when the repeated failures of the federalist strategy during the 1985-1993 period led to Parizeau’s return to power as the new premier of Quebec. He initially wanted to launch a more staunchly separatist strategy during the second referendum campaign, in 1995. Sovereignty-association, after all, was only a form of self imposed neocolonialism, rather like British or French economic control of most of the African comprador nations that had become only theoretically independent during the 1960s and the 1970s.

During that second referendum campaign, however, former Lévesque ally Lucien Bouchard, who had been a minister in the federal conservative government, succeeded in reimposing the old hyphenated strategy, thus infuriating the radicals once again. In fact, the so called pure independence with which I had been associated earlier never really had any chance of succeeding and not only because such a strategy has most often been opposed by large private investors, in Quebec and in many other countries. Most of the less fortunate citizens were also not interested, fearing economic disaster. Unfortunately, genuinely radical ideas are seldom very popular, except perhaps when they serve the interests of the ultra rich, as in the more recent case of the Tea Party movement in the USA.

Back then, I tried again to push for economic nationalism by briefly joining “Le Parti indépendantiste”, a second tiny group of nationalist radicals, becoming the official agent for one of their electoral candidates. He was the same guy who had already been my own campaign manager a few years before that. This new collective was supported by at least one parliamentarian, Pierre de Bellefeuille, who had already been elected under the PQ banner. It was also during that time that I got myself invited onto a popular television talk show, “Droit de parole”, as an anglophone sympathetic to Quebec independence.

During those same years, I completed the bulk of my research for my PhD thesis, on the development of economic nationalist thought in central Canada (Ontario and Quebec) during the mid nineteenth century (1846 to 1885). I ended up finding and analyzing 129 different documents, some of them quite long, others much shorter, written by dozens of Canadian politicians, journalists, businessmen and union leaders at the time, promoting the doctrine of economic nationalism in various different ways. To do so, however, I had to visit a number of different libraries and archives, not only in Montreal, but also in Ottawa and Toronto, not to mention interlibrary loans from universities in Kingston, Hamilton and Quebec City. Much of my information came from the National Archives in Ottawa, where I got particularly interested in the voluminous publications and manuscripts of a Conservative politician, businessman and religious leader from Hamilton, Ontario, called Isaac Buchanan.

This man was quite familiar with the writings of such well known western economic nationalists of the nineteenth century as List, Byles, Carey and Dupin. Under their influence, Buchanan supported what he called “the labor power” in modern society, as opposed to “the money power”, by which he meant that producers of wealth were much more important to economic development than were mere traders. This was a rather intriguing point of view for Buchanan, however, since he was involved in the grain trade in Ontario and therefore belonged to the same group of people that he was denouncing in his writings. Nevertheless, he was certainly the most prolific Canadian economic nationalist of that period. Unfortunately, I found his hundreds of pages of manuscript very difficult to read, the ink having faded badly. By now, all those pages must be totally indecipherable.

Besides doing my research, I found time to give my first paper as a historian to one of the groups participating in the biannual, cross Canada Learned Societies Conference, held that year at the University of Montreal. The Association for Canadian Studies had invited people from all over the world to an international colloquium on “Canadian Society and Culture in Times of Economic Depression”. My contribution was called “Labor’s Political Economy”, a comparison between the reaction of Buchanan’s Association for the Promotion of Canadian Industry to the depression of 1857-1858 and the reaction of the Labor Council of Metropolitan Toronto to the severe recession of the early 1980s. I remember receiving interested comments especially from the Australian delegates.

During that same year, I was not making a great deal of money once again. As a result, I jumped at the chance to get involved in another history project sponsored by the Unemployment Insurance Commission. This time, the project was organized by a labor faction in the construction industry that had taken most of its members away from the Quebec branch of the Carpenters international union. A group of us were hired by them to write a history of the original brotherhood’s activities in Quebec, from the nineteenth century up to the recent takeover. This was another summer project, in which several new people including me inherited work already started by previous researchers and brought it to a successful conclusion. Eventually, the gang of us managed to produce a 100 page document chronicling that union’s presence in Quebec, from the 1830s to the 1970s. It was published as such in the bulletin of a group specializing in the history of Quebec workers.

After that, I was still not getting nearly enough money to survive on by teaching part time at the university, so I started branching out into Quebec’s large network of junior colleges for 17, 18 and 19 year old students. These colleges combine both technical and pre university programs, which are the equivalent of the last year of high school with the first year of university, in other parts of North America. I soon landed two new jobs teaching one course each in two different local colleges. Apparently, I was almost refused one of those assignments since the history teachers in that college thought that their students would not be able to understand some of the complicated concepts that I was using. The job there was teaching the history of the third world, in which I referred again to the comprador bourgeoisie. This was an expression used to describe merchants and politicians from colonial and neocolonial countries who helped administrators and investors from dominant countries run their societies, thereby becoming traitors to their own people. As it turned out, most of my students had no problem whatsoever understanding such concepts.

In the middle of all this activity, I still managed to publish several book reviews, a couple of times for the Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française, specializing in French Canadian history, and a couple of other times for Labour/Le travail, a bilingual publication about labor relations in Canada. One of my reviews was about Ben Forster’s book, A Conjunction of Interests: Business, Politics and Tariffs, on the history of protectionism in Canada from 1825 to 1879. The other history review during that period was about Ian Drummond’s book, Progress without Planning, the Economic History of Ontario from Confederation to the Second World War, in which he tried to argue (unsuccessfully) that the government of Ontario did not intervene much in economic development from 1867 to 1945.

Finally, in the late 1980s I succeeded in getting quite a few more teaching jobs, thus putting an end to several years of only part time work. In itself, this was definitely a move in the right direction since at the very least it meant that I no longer had to accept relatively poorly paid research projects. Nor did I have to receive any more money from the Unemployment Insurance Commission, which by that time had been induced by the Conservative government to harass part timers like myself every time we filled out a form. Nevertheless, for several more years, I was only able to work full time by combining a large number of part time jobs together, at several different colleges and universities, most often in the Montreal area but also in the Ottawa area.

While in Ottawa, I was fortunate enough to meet someone who had become a consultant with one of the world’s leading accounting firms. Apparently, that person had recently been involved in setting up a scheme by which a Canadian holding company had managed to borrow several hundred million dollars from a Canadian bank to purchase an American manufacturing company. In order to avoid paying a large amount of tax to the American government during this transaction, they were advised to send the money to a postage stamp outfit in Europe, which then sent it to another fake firm in the Caribbean, which then used the same money to buy the American company. Since the US government treated that money as an investment coming from the underdeveloped third world, they were able to save about 40% on US taxes.

This information dovetailed nicely with the paper entrepreneurialism that was then being described in the speeches and the writings of economist Robert Reich, who eventually became Bill Clinton’s labor secretary (1993-1997). Reich had explained this same concept at a Montreal conference on “Canada-United States Business Perspectives”, to which I had been invited as a participant back in 1985. I therefore found out a little bit about such creative accounting long before the series of scandals that eventually led to the 2007-2009 financial crisis in the whole world, and I was able to incorporate a lot of that kind of information into my history classes.

During the late 1980s, I also started getting involved in the activities of the provincial coordinating committee of college level history teachers. The government had called upon this committee, along with several other such groups, to help design a new curriculum in the human sciences program that was eventually adopted in the early 1990s. Unfortunately, our numerous meetings on which topic to propose as the compulsory history course in the new curriculum did not have much effect on the government. It soon rejected our proposal on the history of the twentieth century in favor of a general introduction to the history of western civilization. This one-semester course has since been denounced as “Plato to NATO” or “45 centuries in 45 hours”, and is theoretically supposed to cover political, economic, social and cultural history from ancient Greece to the present.

Still another significant event that took place in those days was the paper I gave at the annual convention of the “Institut d’histoire de l’Amérique française”, held that time in Trois-Rivières. This was my first attempt to let larger numbers of historians in Quebec know about the findings I had made during my research. Shortly after that, I also tried to get scientific articles published in various history journals, in other words articles that reflected the serious research I was doing for my thesis, which did not include any unverified material that often crops up in articles written for nonacademic newspapers and magazines.

By this time, the bulk of my research efforts was over and I was then in the process of writing my chapters and submitting them to my thesis committee for approval. Up until then, the main role of my committee of four professors had been to make sure that I found every relevant primary source from the nineteenth century that existed. They also wanted to ensure that I read and reported on every appropriate work on the subject that had been published by other, more recent, secondary sources (professional historians). After that part of my work was finished, they then had me write each one of my chapters separately, after which they would take several weeks to correct each chapter and make suggestions for improvement.

This meant that I had to rewrite all six chapter several times, always attempting to please four different people while still not contradicting my own ideas about what had really happened back in the nineteenth century. Often, one of them would disagree with another professor and we would all argue the point back and forth until we reached a conclusion. After several months of this, the whole procedure began to resemble the old Jesuit habit of training priests by subjecting them to the kind of psychological abuse that was supposed to prepare them to confront their religious opponents in the future. One of the professors even decided to play the devil’s advocate, often deliberately opposing whatever I had to say even if he really agreed with my assessment. Later, he explained to me that if I had fought back more strongly to defend my point of view, the outcome might have been better. Sadomasochistic social relations, once again, since I was by no means the only PhD candidate being treated in this way, and not only in the discipline of history.

I was eager however to publish something on my subject before this long process of getting the thesis accepted had come to an end. So I started by writing an article about economic nationalism in French Canada from 1846 to 1885, that I then submitted for publication to the same review on French-Canadian history that I mentioned earlier. Unfortunately, the editorial board of that prestigious publication turned down my analysis of that subject, apparently because they felt that it was not sufficiently scientific. That was when I found out that their overly restrictive definition of historical science had also disturbed many other researchers, some of them quite well known.

Before long, their attitude was one of the reasons why rival researchers founded several new journals, such as a highly successful Bulletin d’histoire politique, in which I published a few articles later on. However, that bulletin was also started up as an attempt to combine historical research with nationalist militancy, which can easily become a dangerous approach from the point of view of scientific accuracy. Unfortunately, as soon as someone decides to support a particular ideology, that decision colors all the relevant research, thereby making it very difficult to tell the whole truth about the object of that study.

At the time, however, the political history review had not yet started up officially, so I ended up publishing my article in Cahiers d’histoire, a graduate student publication for which I also wrote another piece a couple of years later about the future of nationalism. Nevertheless, I still wanted to get something officially recognized as scientific into print, so I submitted a new article about the international roots of economic nationalist ideology in English Canada to the Journal of Canadian Studies, based at Trent University in Ontario. That particular article was soon published, but only after I had incorporated numerous changes suggested by their editorial board. None of those changes, however, did anything to alter the basic thrust of my piece. The fact that the English version of the same events also included most of the information on French Canada that I had already written for my first article was quite satisfying to me, since it did seem to indicate that the editorial board of the prestigious francophone review was being too zealous after all.

A bit later, I also managed to land a few part time teaching jobs at still another junior college, an English speaking institution this time out. However, my own involvement with that place was rather limited, since I was obliged to leave it when another francophone college offered me much steadier work. During the semesters that I was at the anglophone college, I often argued about the national question with some of the other teachers. This was because I had been hired to teach the history of Canada, including Quebec, and I insisted on teaching that subject the same way in English as I had been accustomed to doing in the French speaking colleges. My opponents often objected to my pedagogical approach, when I attempted to explain the historical background to both sides of one of Canada’s favorite arguments, for and against Quebec independence, without coming to what they thought had to be an obvious conclusion.

As I mentioned earlier, this was the same period in Quebec history in which the sovereignty movement was becoming popular once again, following the failure of several federalist attempts to resolve the issue once and for all. Monique Simard, one of the vice-presidents of the union federation (CSN) to which we belonged, took the opportunity to come to our college to preach for independence, thus adding fuel to the fire. The national question then got all mixed up with an unsuccessful attempt on the part of some union members to get the local teachers association to leave that organization in favor of a rival federation. I joined the little group of activists who eventually managed to keep our college in the more militant, nationalist outfit.

My thesis defense took place right after that. The jury that took over from the original committee included my thesis director, another professor of economic history from Ontario, as well as another Montreal professor who specialized in the same period as my thesis. This third person was also one of the people running the Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française. I gave my thesis defense in French then answered questions partly in English, which is the first time that many of my professors heard me speak that language.

The only individual attending that meeting who I did not already know was a doctoral student interested in the career of Errol Bouchette, a federal civil servant who had published a book on the economic independence of French Canada back in 1912. Some years later, the same student published his own work analyzing the arguments of that 1912 book within their historical context, in which he cited some of the material in my thesis. Since then, I have gradually found out about a few other researchers who have included my thesis among their references, such as a guy who published an article not long after that concerning a French Canadian nationalist journal from the 1920s, which apparently had adopted the same economic doctrine that I was talking about in my thesis. Another researcher who also made reference to my thesis wrote an article published a few years later in MENS, a new review specializing in the intellectual history of French Canada, about the nationalist outlook of Esdras Minville, a well-known Quebec economist during the depression of the 1930s.

Even though about two thirds of the material in my thesis was about English speaking Canada (in Ontario and in anglophone Quebec), I have not yet run into any references to it from any English language sources. Perhaps this was caused by the fact that my thesis is only available in French, but another possible explanation may have been the tendency among some Canadian historians not to want to believe that even patriotic doctrine could also have international origins.

Since that time, I have also wondered if I should not have chosen a topic for my research that would necessarily have resulted in a positive conclusion. Several other people were doing exactly that at the time, choosing something relatively easy to prove, even sometimes receiving prestigious awards for their work. In theory, this was not supposed to be necessary, or even good for the development of each scientific discipline. In the epistemology books that I read at the beginning of my research, it was pointed out that in the sciences a person is considered to have made a significant contribution even if his or her thesis does not succeed in proving what it was originally intended to prove.

In my case, that meant that even though in my conclusion I decided that in mid nineteenth century Canada an organized school of economic nationalist thought had not really crystallized, this was not supposed to have had a negative effect on the perceived rigor of the thesis. Letting other researchers know that my own hypothesis was to be avoided in the future was supposed to have been just as important a contribution to historical science as if I had proved the opposite. Nevertheless, several other articles that I read later on pointed out that this sort of thing has become a major problem, particularly in history and the social sciences. Thousands of new universities and departments competing with each other all over the world have acquired a tendency to give precedence to people who come up with a positive result, since this seems to give greater prestige to their institution. Governments and private foundations are much more inclined to give grants to universities with superior reputations.

In any case, this less than perfect result abruptly put an end to any chances that I may have had of ever becoming a full time university professor in Quebec, not to mention getting my thesis published eventually. In itself, however, getting the doctoral degree was not a waste of time especially because I managed to do all that work without putting my overall teaching career in jeopardy. The PhD also counts for a small bonus in college level teaching, even though the government decided not to include that bonus in any of the more recently negotiated salary increases. However, that has certainly not prevented me from using many of the things that I learned during my research in my classes, particularly when it comes to historical methodology.

During those same years I also got briefly involved, for the last time as it turned out, in the Quebec sovereignty movement. After the Meech Lake constitutional compromise had been finally rejected by two anglophone provinces, in 1991, the Québécois population got very upset at having been slighted once again. Inside the National Assembly, the Liberals and the PQ organized a joint parliamentary commission to ask Quebeckers what should be done next. In that context, David Payne, a long-lasting PQ parliamentarian, asked me to help him organize a new pressure group, for English speaking supporters of Quebec independence.

We put out a couple of press releases and drew up a list of different people who we thought might want to support our little lobby. Then we wrote a brief for the commission and convinced Gary Caldwell, a sociology professor from Bishop’s University, to help us deliver it in front of the television cameras and answer questions from the commissioners. I was also interviewed about all this by a reporter from an anglophone daily. Several months later, however, the initial furor died down again and it soon became clear that most people were still as ambiguous about Quebec’s constitutional status as they ever were. Most of the anglophones we contacted were not at all enthusiastic about our little group and I quickly became disenchanted with the whole situation.

This time around, instead of just searching once again for some other political tendency to support, I started reflecting on my entire history of political activism since I had participated in a federal election campaign in Ontario back in 1965. During almost three decades, I had been involved in a whole series of political parties and movements, none of which really did any of the things that they were supposed to be doing. Not succeeding in politics is one thing, but building up an enormous gap between theory and everyday practice was completely unacceptable. I now believe that one of the main reasons why none of those movements ever behaved as they were supposed to was that they were always under the influence of toxic personalities masquerading as leaders. Those people’s interest in the movement mostly came from wanting to dominate other people and to advance their own careers at the expense of everyone else involved.

Another event during those years was the summer job that I found, teaching a course on Canadian history at still another francophone college in the Montreal area. Unfortunately, I soon became embroiled in yet another argument with an administrator who ran the human sciences division. He wanted me to change my course plan so that it would be obvious to the students that in spite of the title most of the content would be about Quebec history. However, I was not any more willing to do that than I had been to change the content of my Canadian history course at the anglophone college to please the federalists there. In the end, the other history teachers at the francophone college managed to convince the administrator to let me give the course properly.

My full time teaching career at only one institution at a time finally started, however, at yet another college in the Montreal area, right after I had completed my thesis. They decided that they finally had enough work for me for both semesters, which meant that I could at last stop working simultaneously in several different colleges. This also meant that I could start building up seniority in only one place. While there, I teamed up with another history teacher to write a short definition of the discipline of history that was published in a college textbook about research methods in the human sciences. That was the first of several other occasions over the years when I helped many different authors of various other history texts.

In my first real teaching position, I had the opportunity to give a new course on the history of the Second World War, which we conceived as a replacement for the compulsory course on the history of western civilization. The idea was to show how each important characteristic of western civilization had a tremendous influence on the events of the war (and vice versa), not only politically but also economically, socially and culturally. One of the aspects of that war that I wanted to emphasize was genocide, particularly the Nazi attempt to physically eliminate all the Jews, the Roma and several other targeted groups in Europe.

But I also wanted to figure out how those incredibly horrible atrocities fit in with the entire history of attempted genocide over the centuries, and whether or not such attempts were more frequent in the western world than anywhere else. Luckily, two professors at Concordia University, Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn, had just finished writing a well documented book on the subject that they were just then presenting to the public. So I bought that book, The History and Sociology of Genocide: Analyses and Case Studies, directly from the authors and used it to start my research. What I found out is that genocide has been tried over and over again, all over the world, since long before the advent of the first urban based civilizations, as soon as there were enough human beings alive on this planet to make ethnic divisions possible. I have since incorporated that unfortunately recurring theme into several of my courses.

That is when I initially came up with the more general idea to give all those courses by separating content into analytical sections based on the recommendations of the Annales group of historians in France. This meant that each course, divided up into succeeding periods of historical time, had to give more or less equal emphasis to the political, economic, social and cultural evolution of any particular country or civilization. I also decided to divide each aspect into three sections. I divided political history into constitutional politics, geopolitics and ideologies, and economic history into the primary, secondary and tertiary sectors. Then I divided social history into the evolution of social classes, women’s history and the history of minorities, and cultural history into art history, the history of ideas and the history of popular culture. By doing that, I felt that I could avoid following in the footsteps of several other teachers I knew, who always emphasized only one or two of those aspects in their courses.

For each different course that I eventually gave at the college level, I wrote between 75 and 120 pages of text, as course notes. This was in addition to all the similar booklets I had written earlier, in English and in French, for most of my previous courses, at both the college and the university levels, on several other historical subjects. I also typed up a new booklet for the course I was then giving on the history of Russia and the USSR, emphasizing the repetitive, zigzag nature of both the czarist and the Soviet regimes, between more liberal and more authoritarian attitudes. All in all, I must have written more than a thousand pages of this kind of text over the years.

Half the marks allotted for my courses were to come from comparison tables between succeeding periods of history, based on the same twelve criteria that I mentioned earlier. I also tried to encourage other teachers to use the same method, by writing articles about it in a bulletin put out by the Quebec Association of college history teachers, as well as at a provincial conference about teaching the new compulsory course on western civilization. In each one of my texts about every historical topic I was teaching, I tried to make sure that I presented the most relevant information about the ongoing evolution of those same analytical criteria.

However, I had to deal with tremendous time and space limitations, not to mention the fact that I was not an expert in most of those fields. So I was forced to rely on material largely gleaned from a review of about a dozen other people’s textbooks (in each case), confining myself to really essential content. The downside of all this was that, like most other teachers, I often ended up repeating other people’s misinterpretations in some of my texts. On several occasions, I did not learn about those mistakes until several years later when I was reading more recent historical periodicals. The authors of many of those articles were often furious whenever someone’s original error about their favorite topic ended up being repeated all over the world even many years after it had been demolished by them. Given the length of my texts and the number of different courses that I was giving, in a dozen different institutions of post secondary education, I was not able to update my course notes as often as I would have liked.

That did not prevent me, however, from introducing my students to several fascinating controversies. For western history, I focused on the development of the myth of western domination. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, many historians tried to present the west as a kind of Eurocentric, self developing entity that became the unique birthplace of democracy, science and individual initiative. According to this interpretation, those unprecedented qualities justified western domination of the rest of the world that began with the European discovery of southern Africa and the Americas, and reached its climax five hundred years later.

In recent years, however, the focus of many other historians has been on the decline of the west and its projected replacement by Asian civilizations. This has led to a reinterpretation of the western self development myth and a new emphasis on interdependence. During every period of western history, from antiquity through the middle ages, the early modern and the late modern periods, most historians soon began underlining that western civilization had in fact interacted since the beginning with dozens of other civilizations, from every other part of the world.

In the past, overemphasizing western uniqueness led to many different kinds of racism, of which the most vicious was the Nazi attempt to “prove” that the so called Aryans (Indo-Europeans) always dominated the world from the very beginning. In reality, all the different groups of people in the world, including the Europeans, have always been “mongrelized” from the outset, all mixed up both biologically and culturally. This so called miscegenation has been a good thing, rather than the opposite, replacing social incest with a much healthier cultural diversity. Realizing how human development really works means that we have to reject not only the inevitability of western domination, but also any new myths that any other civilizations may be developing nowadays about their own unique attributes for dominating the world in the future.

I also dealt with similar controversies in my other courses. When I was presenting the history of the third world, for example, I tried to compare and contrast what had been happening during the precolonial, colonial and neocolonial periods. The best way to do that was to show how the same facts were interpreted in almost opposite ways, for all three periods, by the two largest groups of third world historians. One group was constantly trying to emphasize the positive influence of imperial domination on their formal colonies as well as on their more recent economic satrapies, while their opponents were constantly emphasizing the negative aspects of the same domination.

In France, there was a particularly virulent dispute during the 1980s between the supporters of Pascal Bruckner and his detractors. Bruckner had written a book, Le sanglot de l’homme blanc, denouncing the apologetic attitude of many politically correct westerners, who ended up supporting the anti imperialist historians of the third world completely. According to many of those historians, all the recent problems of every country in Asia (except Japan and Israel), Africa and Latin America could be exclusively blamed on the political and economic domination of those continents by the Europeans, the (North) Americans and the Japanese. Many of Bruckner’s supporters took exactly the opposite tack, blaming all the recent problems of those same countries exclusively on their own local inadequacies.

A telling example of this kind of thing came from the attempted genocide in Rwanda in 1994, when Hutu extremists killed at least 800 000 people, mostly Tutsis but also more than a few moderate Hutus. The failure of that attempt and the return to power of a new Tutsi government then led to a somewhat less massive wave of killings in neighboring countries, this time mostly of Hutu extremists who had sought refuge there. The pro third world historians dealing with the causes of those horrible events claimed that before the Europeans arrived in that area during the colonial period, the Hutus and the Tutsis had gotten along quite well. According to them, the Rwandans were not divided back then on ethnic lines, but simply belonged to different social classes, the Hutus being mostly farmers and the Tutsis mostly herders. They argued that it was only after the arrival of the German and Belgian colonists that those social classes were transformed into rival ethnic groups competing with each other for western recognition as the dominant “race”.

However, the opposing group of historians heaped a lot of scorn on this interpretation, showing instead that those divisions were genuinely ancestral and based on different geographic origins for the wandering clans or tribes who eventually came to live side by side in the African Great Lakes region. They felt that the genocide may indeed have been exacerbated by western influence, but it was by no means caused by that influence. In other words, those African peoples, like similar ethnic groups in other parts of the world, were quite capable of exhibiting extremely disgusting behavior, all by themselves, without having to be prompted by any outsiders. Those outsiders, however, seldom missed an opportunity to take full advantage of every existing local division, the Americans and the British tending to support the Tutsis while the French and the Belgians apparently sided with the Hutus.

I tried to do a similar thing with my students in that course as I had done in my western civilization course, by pointing out how racist it was to claim that all the recent problems of the third world peoples could be exclusively attributed to either their own inherent characteristics, or to outside intervention. To be sure, the imperialist conquest and domination of all those countries, lasting several centuries, was the most reprehensible of the two attitudes, because it ruined many more lives than did third world “reverse” racism toward their former masters. Nevertheless, that in no way justified the atrocities of the dominant precolonial regimes, any more than it justified the disgusting dictatorships of dozens of more recent third world potentates, nor the sycophantic attitudes of their western supporters. It simply is not true that all (or none) of the recent problems of those countries can be exclusively blamed on a long period of foreign control.

In the conclusion of my course, I also added that even nowadays, quite a large number of countries in the third world are still economically dependent on their former colonial masters, or a more recent replacement. Haiti, for example, has not only suffered from a long series of disgusting dictators since it became theoretically independent in 1804. France, the former imperial power, also threatened Haiti soon after its revolution with a new invasion, forcing that country to go deeply into debt in order to “pay back” the former French slaveowners for the military liberation of their slaves. That interest inflated debt to France was then sold to the USA several decades later and not completely paid back until 1947, meaning that a large part of that country’s annual budget was eaten up directly by neocolonialism for more than a century.

Events such as those help to explain, though they do not justify, the fact that many such countries are still being run by ridiculous elites who truly seem to enjoy mistreating their compatriots as much as they possibly can. Inevitably, they also whine about outside intervention every time someone gets upset about their rotten policies. Very cynically, those corrupt, local elites gratefully accept foreign economic domination most of the time, while simultaneously making sure that any foreign aid they receive ends up going exclusively to their own friends and relatives rather than to the people who need it most.

As for my course on the history of the twentieth century, in the political section I tried to focus on  the geopolitical nature of several major conflicts. During the First World War, for example, the established empires, with the most wealth and the largest number of colonies, organized a diplomatic alliance, the Triple Entente (Britain, France and Russia), which controlled most of the world. Their opponents from the upstart Triple Alliance (Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy, soon replaced by Turkey), were not as rich and had fewer colonies. Although there were several related causes, that war essentially broke out when the second coalition tried unsuccessfully to take control of the world away from the first one. As I pointed out to my students, highflown ideals like democracy and self determination had very little to do with the entire conflict.

The Second World War was a bit more complicated, since the new coalition of established powers (Britain, France and the USA), still with the most wealth and the largest number of colonies, also supported liberal democracy, at least in theory. There were, however, more than a few pro fascist appeasers among their ruling classes, such as the Duke of Windsor in Great Britain, Marshal Pétain in France, and Henry Ford in the USA. At that time, the upstart empires who wanted to take world control away from the established empires were also divided in two by ideology, the fascist powers (Germany, Italy and Japan) on the one hand, and the communist empire based in the Russian-dominated Soviet Union, on the other. The USSR was also supported by the official communist parties inside all the other countries in the world, even when it changed its foreign policy stance completely, several times in a row.

In its first phase (1939-1941), at least in Europe, that war started out as an alliance between the totalitarian powers (the fascists and the communists) against the liberal powers, which lasted until Hitler turned his back on Stalin. During that period, the communist parties dropped their earlier condemnation of fascism for awhile. In the second phase of the war (1941-1945), however, all that totalitarian collaboration was forgotten during a new, worldwide alliance between liberalism and communism, against fascism. As a result, eighty percent of the entire war in Europe (number of deaths, of soldiers mobilized, of tanks, of planes involved, etc.) ended up being fought between the fascists and the communists. In other words, it was not at all a war between democracy and dictatorship, since the liberal western powers were allied during the longer second phase with a regime as totalitarian as the ones they were fighting.

This was exactly the same way that I treated the cold war in the same course. It was not “the free world” against communist aggression at all, since the USA and its liberal allies were also supported by over a hundred military dictatorships, not only in Asia, Africa and Latin America, but also in Europe. At least half of those dictatorships were originally set up with the help of leading western governments, the US Defense Department and the CIA being particularly active. This meant that the cold war was not caused exclusively by the expansionist ambitions of the Soviet Union and its communist allies inside every other country, it was simply the latest phase in the geopolitical contests between imperial rivals, who had conveniently adopted competing ideologies.

I concluded that the entire geopolitical history of the twentieth century was therefore, essentially an enormous, deadly and very costly war of hegemony, in which the established empires triumphed over successive challenges from various upstart empires. To be sure, if any of the lesser empires had won any of those contests, the standards of living and the more or less democratic freedoms of millions of human beings could have been substantially lessened. However, none of that takes away from the fact that the established empires treated their colonies and their home populations very poorly, in some cases just as badly as the lesser empires did. I tried to emphasize to my students that quite often the “good guys” only look good when compared with even more disgusting opponents.

In my history of the USA, I focused on the longstanding battle between those politicians who favored state intervention to solve various economic, social and cultural problems, and their free enterprise opponents. This began as early as the colonial period, some limited colonization having been undertaken to promote laissez faire oriented commercial pillage, and other colonization involving much more complicated efforts toward long term settlement, which encouraged the development of economic nationalism instead. After the revolution, however, the USA as a whole was still largely an economic satrapy (or neocolony) of Great Britain, a situation that lasted from political independence (1783) to the end of the Civil War (1865).

During that period, the Whig Party and its Republican successor started out promoting large scale state intervention (economic nationalism), in a second American revolution aimed at establishing economic independence from the British empire. For most of the nineteenth century, the Democrats staunchly upheld free enterprise instead, initially collaborating with British economic domination as comprador capitalists, especially in the South. According to Stanley Ryerson, that collaboration even extended to plotting the assassination of Abraham Lincoln from the basement of the Hudson’s Bay Company in Montreal, the largest city in the British colony then known as the United Province of Canada.

After economic independence was achieved, however, under the influence of the world wars, the great depression and the cold war, the two major parties in the USA gradually switched around completely, each one adopting the other’s previous point of view about the state versus private enterprise. Quite cynically, neither party has ever honestly explained any part of that complicated process to the voters. Even today, however, the two sides in the economic policy debate still reflect their colonial origins, although on the free enterprise side, commercial pillage has largely morphed into financial speculation.

Another thing about the history of the USA that I emphasized was the longstanding popular tendency to date American political independence from the 1776 declaration. In fact, that independence had to be earned on the battlefield and was only officially recognized in 1783, after the combined American, French, Spanish and Dutch military defeat of Great Britain. Without the European intervention, the USA might not have come into being for quite a long time, if at all. Naive people all over the world still make this kind of mistake nowadays, by substituting mere intentions for political achievements.

True believers in democracy as a principle still naively think that it really means rule by the people, whereas in reality it only means that the ruling elite has set up a periodic voting system to give ordinary people the illusion of genuine power. This means that though democracy is certainly better than out and out dictatorship, it is not at all the panacea that most people seem to think it is. The same argument holds for feel good documents like the American Bill of Rights or the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms; they can only function in the absence of any important political, economic, social or cultural crisis. In human society, the balance of power between competing forces is always determined by the ongoing struggle for that power, not by eloquent words written down in some supposedly fundamental document.

In my course on the history of Quebec, I again tried to focus on major historical controversies. For example, I pointed out that the division in Canada, between federalism and Quebec separatism, has essentially been a clash between two competing forms of nationalism. This means that federalist politicians are simultaneously Canadian patriots and Quebec traitors, while separatist politicians are both Quebec patriots and Canadian traitors. Avoiding the use of emotionally charged words like patriot and traitor, as politically correct people try to do, is deliberately misleading. Teachers should be presenting political controversies honestly in class, not trying to tone them down or make them disappear altogether.

In that same course, I also referred to several more particular controversies. One of those was about the “children of Duplessis”, which reflected very poorly on the anticommunist, pro American and very undemocratic premier of Quebec during the 1950s. His “children” were in fact infants abandoned by ostracized unwed mothers and obliged to submit to years of physical and psychological abuse in residential schools and psychiatric institutions. Those illegitimate children were treated like mental patients because the premier wanted the federal government rather than the province to pay for their care and that level of government paid a lot more when they were classified as insane people.

As well as referring to such abuses on the francophone side, I made sure to include similar abuses on the anglophone side. My favorite example was Doctor Ewen Cameron, a psychiatrist from McGill University who received a lot of money from the CIA between 1950 and 1965 as part of the MK-Ultra brainwashing experiment. Many of Doctor Cameron’s patients (guinea pigs) were subjected to various forms of treatment (torture) in an attempt to figure out how to control people’s behavior over a long period of time. Apparently, the ultimate, but unsuccessful, goal of all this attempted brainwashing was to maintain control over spies who had been captured by the other side during the cold war.

Another idea I had was that the sovereignty movement in Quebec eventually became popular as an outcome of the so called quiet revolution. This was a period lasting about twenty years (1960-1981) during which all the successive governments of that province promoted widespread state intervention to modernize the Quebec economy, as well as its social and cultural programs. In reality, though most Quebec historians never acknowledge this point, the quiet revolution was just the local version of the thirty glorious years (1945-1975) of state supported, multi sectorial development all over the world. Many of the Quebec politicians, but not all of them, were carried along by the interventionist momentum of that period to the point where they wanted to do away with the Canadian connection altogether.

A large percentage of the population agreed with the separatists, particularly when the federal government’s own promotion of panCanadian nationalism, under Pierre Trudeau, abandoned the bilingual, bicultural vision of Canada that had become popular in Quebec. Trudeau’s multicultural ideology tried to turn the Québécois into just another minority group. In two referendums (1980 and 1995), however, the sovereignty movement never managed to get quite enough popular support to achieve its goal, although the second time around in particular their defeat may have been triggered by large scale, illegal federal spending on so called sponsorship schemes, that resulted in a huge scandal many years later.

To sum up those different controversies in all my courses, I concluded that all recorded history over the past 6000 years of urban based civilization, in every part of the world, has been characterized by about equal amounts of good things and bad things, as well as a lot of other stuff that was neither good nor bad. In every one of those courses I tried to promote critical thinking, believing that one of the best ways to do that was to make sure that students were exposed to both the positive and the negative aspects of every country, civilization and period of history that I was trying to describe.

While I was at my first full time college, I also took my first Performa course, set up by the University of Sherbrooke to give junior college teachers some formal training in pedagogical methods. I did quite well in that particular course, which was based on how to give the new research methods course to human science students. In this case, my idea was to concentrate on content analysis rather than on any of the other more discipline specific methods of research, since it was one of the few that is regularly used in many different fields of study. My doctoral thesis had also used a form of content analysis.

I decided to adapt that method to the junior college level of teaching by getting the students to read a reasonable number of pages about a relevant topic of their choice, from various sources found in the library, and then to follow a limited number of analytical steps to ascertain the ideological bias of each author. The obvious assumption was that anything that they could find would necessarily have such a bias, even if the document had been written by a supposedly neutral professor from one of the social sciences. For several years afterward, I gave that course many times, often being pleasantly surprised by the perspicacity of some of my students.

Unfortunately, I had to leave that place because one of the history teachers from another college nearby, who had more seniority in the college network than I had, decided to change places with me. Ostensibly, this was because of a temporary decline in enrollment in the human science division in his college. Since the other teacher had a form of tenure, or permanence, and I had not yet accumulated enough local experience to acquire the same status where I was, that person was able to bump me out of the permanent post that my own college had initially offered to me.

So I ended up teaching full time at the other place instead, for a couple of years without tenure, following which I earned my own permanence there. It was only several months after I arrived at my new college that I was able to confirm what I had initially suspected, that the teacher who had bumped me had not really been required by the collective agreement to leave that college after all. This meant that I had to wait until 1994 to finally achieve limited job security in Quebec’s junior college system, after a decade and a half of mostly part time teaching, in a dozen different postsecondary institutions.

During those same years, I also put a lot of effort into writing a book that I called Universal Nationalism, which was largely based on my doctoral research. I managed to write around two hundred pages about the history and the philosophy of nationalism, all over the world, from the mercantilist period to the present day. Inside that book, I attempted to develop my own interpretation of the nationalist ideology as a sort of Hegelian concrete universal, in which each nationstate tried to present its own version of such modern and supposedly universal values as economic development. When it was finished, I sent the manuscript to several different publishers, in Canada and the United Kingdom to get it into print. Unfortunately, various editors told me that it was either not good enough for them or that they had other priorities for publishing at that time. Eventually, I gave up trying to get it printed, particularly since I felt that the main reason why it was being refused was because it was too radical for most publishers. 

However, my disappointment with the repeated publication refusals was tempered by the fact that I soon changed my mind about the main thrust of my interpretation. Nation states and nationalist movements do indeed compete with each other over their own ethnic group’s place in overall human history, but the result is increasing division rather than any kind of convergence. I now feel that the search for identity, no matter what the religion or ideology, is mainly an attempt to “prove” how superior the supporters of that ideology supposedly are over any rival group of human beings.

In the beginning, the search for identity was based on the extended family, the clan and the tribe. That is why more than a few “prehistoric” groups of people initially invented some kind of myth about how they were the only real human beings in their designated area. In more recent times, this exclusionist idea was passed on to the nationstate and adopted by the colonial system, becoming the root cause of modern racism and competition for hegemony. This became one of my favorite themes in many of the articles that I was getting published during that part of my life.

At the beginning of that same period, I also participated actively in defending my union federation against another unsuccessful raid by a rival labor organization, much like the one that had taken place a couple of years before that when I was teaching at an anglophone college. After that, while I was starting out at my new francophone college, I  got a call from an anglophone university, asking me if I would like to fill an opening for an evening course on Canadian economic history, for students in the economics department. For several years, therefore, I was also giving one class per week at that university.

That was when the Quebec government launched a general reform of all the junior college programs, based on the outcomes or competency approach that had originally been developed in the USA, notably at Alverno College in Wisconsin. This meant that teachers had to abandon their old approach, mostly focused on teaching basic knowledge (facts), and adopt a new approach involving teaching not only knowledge, but also intellectual skills and attitudes (behavior). In the human science program, the government added three new multidisciplinary courses, two of them focused on methodology (quantitative and qualitative), and an integrated research project, designed to conclude the program.

At the college where I was working at the time, I became part of a committee of five teachers from four different disciplines, whose job it was to read a large number of documents on the competency based approach, interview various different experts and develop our own local version of the integrated project. One of the experts whose thinking influenced me a lot at that time was E. D. Hirsch, Jr., who had already been involved for several years in a huge controversy about that approach in the USA. Later on, he neatly summed up his point of view in a preface to a fascinating collective effort called The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know. His point was that by focusing on a reductionist, business oriented form of competency, educators were effectively jeopardizing their students basic cultural literacy.

The entire reform, however, was hotly contested by all the teachers unions, often for very good reasons. In the pre university programs, it was true that there had been very little coordination between any of the competing disciplines. It was also true that few teachers tried to show the students how knowledge was acquired in any of the disciplines, treating the information they supplied as if it were the only possible version of the facts. In reality, all academic disciplines have always been divided into competing schools of thought or rival approaches. Unfortunately, most of our students had had to wait until they reached the MA level before they found out anything at all about methodology, or about conflicting interpretations of the same facts. At that level, all facts are properly interpreted as nothing more than intellectual constructs, even when based on rigorous analysis.

Nevertheless, it was hardly appropriate to start teaching those things in pre university programs when the vast majority of bachelor programs at the university were giving exactly the same kind of disciplinary content as we had been giving at the college level before the reform. It was also ridiculous to pretend, as many college administrators did, that 17, 18 and 19 year old students no longer have to accumulate any kind of basic knowledge about their world because all they have to do these days is to look up any facts they might need on the internet. In reality, it is completely impossible to distinguish between scientific material and ideological nonsense, about any subject, when a person has a very incomplete grasp of how things work in the real world.

Around the same period, I published another scientific article based on my doctoral research, in the highly-regarded Canadian Review of Studies in Nationalism, based at the University of Prince Edward Island. The central concept in that article was that economic nationalism was specifically conceived by its founders and practitioners as an intermediate doctrine between laissez faire individualism and statist totalitarianism. William Spira, the editor of that journal, included a reference to my article in a highly specialized encyclopedic dictionary that he published several years later in the USA, about nationalism and ethnicity terminologies.

Shortly thereafter, I also joined the editorial board of an intellectual quarterly that was being put out back then by a group of teachers based at one of the Quebec colleges. I enjoyed getting one of my own articles published in a 200-page special issue on nationalism as a concept, using that same article later on as a résumé exercise for some of my students because of its emphasis on the different ways in which nationalism has been interpreted over the years. Several months after that, however, I left that board when they rejected another article I had written for a special issue on sacred beliefs. In that article, I tried to point out that believers in revealed religions are forced by the universal, ontological nature of their belief to become either dogmatic fundamentalists or hypocritical, part time believers. Since many of the other members of the board were practicing Catholics, under the leadership of a well known (retired) priest, their attitude was to be expected. Unfortunately, this was not the first, nor the last time that I had to stop collaborating with a periodical because of editorial censorship.

Later on, I contributed an article to the bulletin of the Quebec Association of college history teachers about using the competency approach in our classes. That article, however, was poorly received by several other teachers, who had their own negative comments about it published in subsequent issues of the same bulletin. In my opinion, the government was not being very honest in its approach, since its definition of competency seemed to be influenced by budget cutting schemes. Most of the books and articles that I read at the time promoting that approach, such as those of French education specialist Philippe Perrenoud, emphasized that competency was supposed to be a complex blend of content, intellectual skills and attitudes. It seemed to me, however, that the government really wanted us to drastically reduce the teaching of content in favor of putting all the emphasis on teaching good communication skills only. I even coauthored an article to that effect, which was printed in the bulletin of our union federation.

Several of my colleagues did not seem to grasp the distinction that we were making between the promotion of real competency and the government’s more reductionist interpretation. That distinction, however, was not missed by the editor in chief of Pédagogie collègiale, a semi official Quebec magazine specializing in pedagogical methods. He refused another article I submitted a bit later about competency on the grounds that his readers might become confused, since my definition of the subject was not the same as that of the government. So I once again became a victim of editorial censorship.

It was also during that period that I started writing the occasional piece for the aforementioned Bulletin d’histoire politique, whose editors took pride in being more open to competing viewpoints than other journals. The first contribution I made for them was a review of Ronald Wright’s book, Stolen Continents: The New World through Indian Eyes. I was particularly incensed by Wright’s reverse racism. He started out correctly expressing his entirely justified indignation about the fact that the Amerindians had all been pushed off their lands during the past five centuries. But he got carried away with his emotions and ended up writing a history that was as biased against the European colonists as most nineteenth and twentieth century histories used to be biased against the native peoples.

I felt that denouncing the very numerous, and very real, western atrocities against the indigenous ethnic groups was no excuse for downplaying the morally equivalent atrocities that their own empires committed against their own victims, not only during the colonial period but also long before the Europeans showed up. In fact, this kind of misinterpretation has been going on for generations. One of the most important early western historians of the Mayan civilization made a similar mistake when he attempted to convince everyone else that the Mayans treated their enemy captives much better than old world civilizations ever did. It turns out that the Mayan rulers in fact treated their captives very cruelly indeed.

I also decided back then to get more involved for awhile in the inner dynamics of the college where I was working at the time, among other things by getting myself elected to the academic council and participating in several of its auxiliary committees. This meant that I found myself debating with representatives from all over the college about how we were supposed to be implementing, or hesitating to implement, several other aspects of the government’s reform of Quebec’s college system. Quite a few of the teachers were not only opposed to the competency method but also to the new program approach. Up until that time, most of the college programs had been organized through collaboration between the ministry of education, the local college administration and the individual disciplines or departments. But then the government insisted that we set up multidisciplinary program committees instead, composed not only of teachers from all the different disciplines, but also administrators, support staff and student delegates.

Many of the teachers were afraid that each program committee would soon start limiting academic freedom, by requiring us to determine such things as course content and teaching methods by negotiating with people who only had a limited grasp of what an academic discipline was all about. In meetings, as well as in articles published in the local teachers union bulletin, I took the middle road for once, arguing that the program approach did not necessarily limit academic freedom, as long as all the teachers did not become overzealous about doing everything in exactly the same way. It was probably true that some of us had been too individualistic in the past, such as when we gave a course about the history of the Second World War in the slot reserved for the history of western civilization. But that did not mean that we had to go over to the opposite extreme by requiring everyone to use the same textbook, or to use exactly the same kinds of exams and course work.

Still, I also wrote an article warning my colleagues about the musings of a semi-governmental think tank, the Conseil supérieur de l’éducation, concerning the reform. After reading many of the documents published by those local experts, I got the distinct impression that some people in high places were trying to push through a kind of phony consensus, using the administrative procedure known as the Delphi method. This happens whenever management decides by itself what it wants to do in advance, then proceeds to manufacture a series of democratic consultations aimed at manipulating a group of employees. In the end, they seem to arrive at precisely the same conclusions as those originally decided upon before the so called consultations even began.

In spite of that article, I was elected as one of two teachers coordinating the first program committee in the human sciences. As co-chairs of the program committee, we soon became heavily involved with the college administration in an overall evaluation of our program at that college, as part of a province wide evaluation imposed by a group of experts appointed by the National Assembly (the Quebec legislature). As could be expected, this exercise was not very popular with many of the other teachers from the same program. As a result, several of those teachers got the impression that we were becoming pro administration sycophants, rather than the program delegates that we were supposed to be.

Several times during that evaluation period, we called a general assembly of all the teachers in that program to discuss what was going on. In those meetings, the teachers soon divided up into two factions, a majority that tended to support most of what we were doing and a highly vocal minority that denounced us as sellouts to the bosses. At one point, one of the minority teachers went too far in his opposition, drawing up a libelous letter that was unfortunately signed by several other colleagues. Most of the teachers, however, reacted very negatively to that outrageous libel. In the end, the gang of us who participated managed to print up a very long and detailed report about every aspect of the program, followed by a long list of specific recommendations for the future.

Nevertheless, I soon got the disagreeable impression that the whole process had been nothing but an exercise in futility, designed primarily to impress editorial writers for the daily newspapers about the seriousness of the entire reform. The government and its new bureaucracy, set up to implement their own initial strategy, continued on exactly as before, just the way that I had initially predicted they would in my article about the Delphi method of management. Our recommendations, and those of all the other junior colleges involved in the same procedure, were only followed when they happened to coincide with the government’s own previously adopted point of view. That was in complete contradiction with what we had been told when we had been induced to join the evaluation process in the first place. The whole thing turned out to be just another example of how working within the system can be every bit as frustrating and ultimately futile as trying to effect social change from the outside. It was also another excellent example of powerful people using their opponents naiveté to enforce sadomasochistic social relations.

A few months later, I found out by chance that the university department where I had been teaching an evening course on the economic history of Canada was planning to eliminate that course. Like many other economics departments all across North America, they wanted to tighten up their curriculums, to promote their own discipline by cutting off any possible relationship to other disciplines, such as history. I wrote up a spirited defense of my course, but the department decided to scrap it anyway, along with other courses on world economic history and the history of economic thought. Their campaign against economic history was really quite odd, given the fact that two American historians had won the Nobel Prize for economics only a couple of years before that. But they nevertheless decided to react to recent budget cutbacks by strengthening econometrics instead.

In the meantime, I tried to compensate for that loss a little bit by giving a paper at a conference sponsored by the same political history association that published the aforementioned bulletin, on the evolution of Quebec nationalism. My paper was essentially a summary of what I had learned about the subject during my MA and PhD research as well as an attempt to make interesting parallels with current political events. Unfortunately, none of the proceedings of that particular conference, that the organizers had promised would eventually be published in book form, ever came out afterwards.

In those days, during summer vacations, I continued to visit different places across Canada as I had done before, making sure to take in the historical sites as well as the other tourist attractions. In British Columbia, for example, I made a point of seeing Cumberland, one of the company towns in which some of the more famous confrontations had taken place many decades before that between strikers and company men. On another trip, I had quite a good time visiting such places as Grosse Isle, not far from Quebec City, which used to be a quarantine center for plague ridden Irish immigrants fleeing the politically exacerbated famines of the nineteenth century, as well as being used for bacteriological warfare research during the Second World War.

Later on, during the same trip, a torrential rainstorm prevented everyone from seeing much of anything during what was supposed to have been a whale sighting cruise. After having practically capsized our huge boat, the storm also started washing out all the roads in the area. My traveling companion and I tried to solve that problem by attempting to drive inland towards the Saguenay district, but that turned out to be a major mistake since there was even more massive flooding in that area. One of the local industries in that region decided to release huge quantities of water onto everyone else’s property in order to protect its own hydroelectric dam. This event was later described in the Quebec newspapers as a local version of disaster capitalism. In the end, we were forced to spend the night in the car outside the recreation center of a nearby town, which was chock full of local refugees, and then wait in line for hours the next day to get a ferry ride back to safety.

During that same period of my life, I got involved in another interesting controversy about Quebec history. After having narrowly lost the second referendum on sovereignty, the PQ government had finally gotten around to making an investigation into the teaching of history within the province. They appointed Jacques Lacoursière, a well known nationalist historian, to preside over the commission, expecting his group to come up with recommendations to reinforce history teaching at all levels, with an accent on national (Quebec) history.

Unfortunately for the government, the commissioners were heavily influenced by political correctness, particularly of the multicultural variety. Their report certainly recommended giving more attention to history teaching at all levels, but also studiously avoided any mention of paying particular attention to Quebec nationalism. They suggested instead that all teachers of Quebec history should attempt to cover all the bases by talking especially about the roles of women, of native peoples and of immigrants in the evolution of Quebec society, without mentioning the concept of the Quebec nation as such. This inevitably led to a torrent of protests from nationalist circles.

I managed to get an article published in Le Devoir, in which I emphasized that the commission should have tried to avoid the influence of Canadian nationalism, by then largely based on the multicultural myth, at least as much as it tried to avoid the influence of Quebec nationalism. This was because even in Quebec Canadian nationalism had become stronger than Quebec nationalism, and therefore more of a threat to any teacher trying to avoid political or social prejudice altogether.

Several years later, the whole controversy flared up again, the separatist historians and their supporters squaring off one more time against their federalist opponents, this time allied with several social historians unhappy with what they felt was a separatist tendency to put political history ahead of every other aspect. In my opinion, all our courses should include accurate descriptions of every major kind of historical injustice, whether political, economic, social or cultural in origin. Over the years, federalist politicians have often mistreated the Quebec nation as a whole, as well as particular groups of people within Quebec, but so have many Quebec nationalists. Why not just acknowledge and underline all the most important kinds of injustice in history, no matter who committed them?

Back then, I made another contribution to the same debate by writing an article in the Bulletin d’histoire politique about my own experience as a “false anglophone”. In fact, it was my first attempt at a public autobiography, since I related what had happened to me since I had arrived in Quebec over twenty years before that, not only my experiences with the PQ and the rest of the nationalist movement, but also with my family and colleagues within the anglophone community. In that article, I put forward my own interpretation of the conflict between the Québécois majority and the English Canadian national minority. Over the centuries, both sides had integrated many native peoples into their respective linguistic communities, as well as immigrants coming mainly from other parts of the British and the French empires. In debates over the national question and the teaching of Quebec history, I argued that it does no good whatsoever to try to ignore the eternal division between those “two solitudes”, or any other equally controversial material.

Later on, I also wrote several other articles for the bulletin of the Quebec Association of college history teachers, about the need to deliberately include controversial material in all our courses and not to accept the prevailing ideologies of political correctness and liberal imperialism. One of my texts was a book review of anthropologist Roland Viau’s study about war and cannibalism in Iroquois society, in which I emphasized how Viau had made a valuable contribution to debunking the myth of the noble savage, as well as the myth about fixed tribal identities among native peoples before and after the arrival of the Europeans.

My general opinion was that every group of human beings, whether they be ethnic groups, religious groups, political groups, nations or empires, all have their own strong points, and weak points, and that none of them have ever avoided major violence or any of the other forms of negative behavior. However, I also pointed out once again that dominant social formations usually commit quite a few more crimes against humanity than do dominated collectives, for the simple reason that the stronger groups have more power and therefore more opportunity to do evil. Lord Acton’s dictum, “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely”, was supposed to apply to individuals, but could just as easily be used to describe social ensembles.

I went back to that same general theme a couple of years later when I wrote a third article for the Bulletin d’histoire politique. This one was a commentary inspired by the recent publication of Esther Delisle’s book about the political activities of the ultra right wing nationalists in Quebec (Myths, Memory & Lies: Quebec’s intelligentsia and the fascist temptation 1939-1960). In that article, I acknowledged the fact that many of those people were not only antisemitic but had also helped several proNazi refugees escape from Europe after the Second World War. However, I then added that many English Canadian politicians from the same period, such as Canadian prime minister WLM King, were just as antisemitic as some of those Quebec nationalists. Even Pierre Elliott Trudeau had been antisemitic in his youth, before becoming one of the founders of liberal multiculturalism.

Moreover, I thought that Delisle’s attempt to associate the recent Quebec sovereignty movement with the ultra nationalists of yesteryear was the same type of guilt by association that could be used against competing ideologies as well. Socialist sympathizers, for example, could be held responsible for the millions of people killed during provoked famines in the USSR or the People’s Republic of China, while liberal sympathizers could be blamed for the deaths of millions of people killed by the carpet bombing carried out by democratic countries during the Second World War and the cold war.