Canada’s 1960s

I have just finished reading Bryan D. Palmer’s book, Canada’s 1960s: The Ironies of Identity in a Rebellious Era, published back in 2009. It is quite a long book, over 600 pages all told, but eminently readable and chock full of pertinent information and extensive end-notes. Over the years, I have found Palmer’s numerous contributions to Canadian history very useful. I used one of his earlier books to help me remember some of the events that I was personally involved in during the 1960s and the 1970s, in order to write part of my political and intellectual autobiography, “A life full of lies” (2013). A couple of his other works were also among the references that I used to write my doctoral thesis back in 1991, “The Doctrine of Economic Nationalism in Central Canada, 1846-1885”.

As the title of Palmer’s book suggests, most of his text about Canada during the 1960s is focused on the various kinds of rebellious movements that took place back then, such as the wave of wildcat strikes in various different industries across the country, the emergence of the New Left, the student movement and the anti-Vietnam war movement, the rise of radical Quebec nationalism and the development of Red Power among Canada’s native peoples. Palmer did an impressive job bringing together material from a wide variety of sources on those events, including works like Myrna Kostach’s Long Way from Home: The Story of the Sixties Generation in Canada (1980). I am definitely going to have to read some of those other texts as well, many of which I did not even know existed.

To provide period background for his book, Palmer also decided to add quite a bit of material about such people as Gerda Munsinger, George Chuvalo, Marshall McLuhan and Pierre Trudeau. Personally, I thought that some of those references, while interesting, were not nearly as useful to his text as would have been his inclusion of the way that the Canadian justice system blundered through the wrongful condemnation of 14-year-old Steven Truscott for the rape and murder of 12-year-old Lynne Harper, back in 1959. The horribly botched Truscott trial was thoroughly denounced not only in Isabel Lebourdais’s 1966 book on the subject, but also in hundreds of other articles published at the time. Since then, this has become the most important criminal case in Canadian history, going all the way to the Supreme Court, a saga that includes the original death sentence, the many years Truscott spent languishing in prison, several million dollars in government compensation for wrongful conviction, and hundreds more articles, books and television programs.

Why didn’t Palmer make any reference whatsoever to that incredible story? It seems to me that one of the best ways to show how truly unjust former justice minister Pierre Trudeau’s so-called “Just Society” really was back then would have been to underline how thoroughly disgusting the official Canadian response to that rural travesty turned out to be. Even nowadays, the justice system still refuses to declare Truscott officially innocent, probably to protect a number of VIPs involved at the time, such as the junior Ontario Provincial Police officer investigating the case, who later climbed up the ladder to become the head of the force.

But my main criticism of the Palmer book has nothing to do with his decision not to include anything about Truscott. What upsets me more is the utopian socialist approach adopted by Palmer towards “the people”, that is anyone who is not part of the upper-class establishment blamed by Palmer for almost everything rotten that happens in society. As a Trotskyist scholar, Palmer builds his case for rebellion by pointing out how the world’s most important investors and politicians are constantly conspiring to make sure that they always end up on top of everyone else. They are members of what Palmer calls the capitalist ruling class and he quite correctly holds them mainly responsible for the very poor working and living conditions that many poorer, less powerful people had to put up with back then, as well as more recently. Industrial workers across Canada during the 1950s, most of the francophone population of Quebec before the “Quiet Revolution”, an even larger percentage of the native peoples in every province, most Black people throughout North America, all of those groups suffered greatly, some more than others, prior to the rebellious era of the 1960s. (For many of those same people, not much has changed since that time.)

Palmer does quite a good job documenting all of that, as well as lambasting the global geopolitical conflict of the Cold War that lay behind the amassing of huge stockpiles of atomic, bacteriological and chemical weapons of mass destruction, as well as the incredibly violent proxy wars in places like Korea and Vietnam. Most of that analysis is certainly true, relevant and pertinent to his case that much of the rebelliousness of the 1960s was appropriately directed against the big shots whose overbearing egoism lay behind all of those situations. It is also true, though Palmer leaves this out, that though they ruled many fewer countries, the state capitalists of the so-called communist countries treated their populations at least as poorly as did the private capitalists and their own stables of compliant politicians.

What I do not like about Palmer’s analysis, along with that of many of his sources, is his attempt to explain or justify every negative aspect of those rebellious movements by referring back to the ruling class. It is not a good idea, for example, to exclusively blame large anglophone companies and their political cronies for the mostly innocent people killed by the FLQ during their ten years of violent activity in Quebec. (Unless of course the rumors are true and the entire FLQ was under the complete control of the RCMP, or some other secret service, at the time.) Nor do rotten living and working conditions completely explain or justify such crimes as arson, drug trafficking, sexual exploitation, and so on, not only when they are carried out by rich white men, but also when they are carried out by people from within the more oppressed communities (poorly-paid workers, most women, Blacks, natives, etc.). Just belonging to a group of oppressed people does not give any individual the right to mistreat those around him. The fact that the world’s richest and most powerful people do all of those things on a much more massive scale, all the time, does not exonerate any of the poorer and less powerful people from trying to copy them.

Religious identity crises

I started my blog in August 2012 by writing up a preliminary version of my political and intellectual autobiography, “A life full of lies”, that I then replaced in April 2013 with a more complete version. That text was essentially an account of all the different controversies that I was involved in during the past several decades, beginning as far back as 1965. Now I would like to add occasional commentaries based on the more recent evolution of many of those same controversies, whenever I feel that I have something to contribute to those ongoing debates, that no one else seems to have thought about.

One such debate that resurfaced in August 2013 is the Quebec government’s newest attempt at trying to impose a more secular approach toward religion, notably by getting public sector employees to refrain from wearing religious insignia when dealing with the public. The minority Parti Quebecois government, re-elected several months ago after a long hiatus, is profiting from the popularity of such a move among francophone Quebecers to force all the other political parties into re-aligning their competing stances on this issue. It looks as if the main focus of the debate is about whether or not to confine this move to only persons in legal authority, such as judges, or to all public sector employees including hospital staff and teachers. Should provincial or municipal personnel be banned from wearing crosses, skull caps, head scarfs and so on, because in so doing they seem to be proselytizing for some particular religion when they ought to be proclaiming ideological neutrality?

I was involved in a similar debate several years ago, in 2007, when I managed to get an article published in a francophone daily denouncing the masochistic attitude of the multicultural experts, trying so hard to “reasonably accommodate” every ultra-conservative religious group’s attempt at imposing its own ideological agenda on the more moderate majority. Unfortunately, then as now the whole controversy about how society is supposed to react in these situations has been sullied by the tendency among most English Canadians to use all-inclusive multiculturalism as a weapon against Quebec separatism, and the opposing tendency to use provincial government neutrality toward religion as a fundamental characteristic of what currently makes French-speaking Quebec different from the rest of Canada.

This time around, however, it suddenly occurred to me that this whole debate ostensibly focused on minority rights and freedom of religion is not really about those things at all. Nor should it be considered as just another part of the ongoing constitutional conundrum. In fact, as I implied in several of my past writings, this religious insignia phenomenon is just a special case of ego identification, all over the world, of people trying to solve their own personal identity crises at everyone else’s expense. Throughout history, the people who become religious fanatics, or ideological fanatics, are constantly attempting to convert everyone else to their own very particular world-view. They really want to turn the world upside down, to get the tail to wag the dog so to speak, thereby enabling the extremist minorities to dictate overall political and social behavior to the moderate majority.

People who ostentatiously attach religious insignia to their person do so for the very same reasons that other attention seekers insist on wearing their nation’s flag on their clothing and their property all the time, even when traveling in a foreign country. Their behavior is also quite similar to that of the Maoists I was involved with back in the 1960s, who always wore their Mao buttons whenever they went out, not to mention waving their copies of the Little Red Book in the faces of everyone they met. Many of today’s religious fanatics insist on showing off their colors even when they are supposed to be dealing with the general public as elected representatives or as appointed officials of government. Then they insult other people’s intelligence by claiming that their religious ostentation has no effect whatsoever on their own professional neutrality.

These toxic personalities are particularly interested in bolstering their over-weaning egos by forcing everyone else to adapt to their way of thinking, rather than the other way around. They are part and parcel of the currently dominant wave of libertarian individualism, as in the Tea Party movement in the USA, claiming blatant proselytism as a fundamental human right rather than the more obvious right of normal people to be left alone. Women sporting head scarves, face masks or even overall body armor, are also insulting others by trying to pretend that the very sight of their unadorned beauty would automatically turn every nearby male into a significant threat to their own security.

Moderate practitioners of the various religions that these extremists profess are particularly targeted by such blatant ostentation. They are required to constantly defend their religions by pointing out to non-believers that it is really quite possible, after all, to be a good Christian, or a good Jew, or a good Muslim, etc., without putting on a ceremonial costume in public, particularly when they find themselves in a position of authority.

Unfortunately, it seems highly unlikely that the Quebec government, or any other secular administration, will ever be able to prevail in this debate. In a world chock full of unabashed super-egos, including multi-billion-dollar vulture capitalists, arrogant big-time polluters and mass-murdering dictators, any attempt at controlling such a relatively insignificant form of social bullying is probably doomed to fail.