Are we even allowed to say "terrorism"?

It's a story that cries out for big-screen treatment. For now, The Real Story will have to do.

We begin with a quiz. No peeking.

In the annals of 20^th century North American terrorism, what comes in second, after the longest-running barbarism of the Ku Klux Klan in the American Southern States?

Hint: It carried on for decades, in Canada. As a story that captured international headlines, it began with a mysterious explosion aboard a train in the 1920s. Nine people were killed, including an enigmatic religious leader fro Russia and a Conservative politician. The terror campaign didn’t peter out until the late 1970s.

Among the suspected culprits in the train bombing: Bolshevik secret agents, dispatched from Moscow. Wrong, but the guilty were never caught. While the terror had very powerful Cold War undercurrents, it was homegrown. It came in waves of guerrilla warfare waged by cells of fanatics armed with molotov cocktails and crude bombs fashioned from sticks of dynamite.

Hundreds of businesses, government offices and private homes were burned to the ground. Dozens of towns and villages were attacked, and some never really recovered. Factories, sawmills, canneries, bridges, rail lines and power lines were blown up. Nearly 1,000 extremists were jailed, and two special prisons had to be built to house them all.

Anyone have a guess what this is about? Final clues:

After an initial eruption of depravities in Saskatchewan in the first few years of the 20th century, the terrorism was waged in intermittent bursts, mostly in British Columbia’s interior, and mostly in the Kootenay Mountains.

A tabloid journalist wrote a terribly unhelpful but immensely popular book about it, titled Terror in the Name of God, not to be confused with Jessica Stern’s Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill.

Okay, enough tomfoolery.

Not just some hippies from a 1960s-era commune.

The answer is a thing I write about, but only a bit, in the National Post today: B.C.'s apology to Doukhobor children reopens another disturbing chapter in Canadian history. I’m not crazy about the headline, but fair enough, there’s a lot going on in the piece, and there will be a fairly in-depth telling of the story coming in the Real Story this weekend. It’s a hell of a yarn, believe me. So stick around.

Why this and not that?

I’d been meaning to use the foil of B.C.’s apology to get into the story of the Doukhobours and the Freedomite terror for a long time anyway, and this week I decided, what the heck.

I figured I could write something about the Freedomite apology instead of writing about the disgraceful shambles of the House of Commons debate over that dishonest and fundamentally stupid New Democratic Party motion that pretended to be about Israeli-Palestinian peace by means of a two-state solution.

I reckoned it was all just so awful and embarrassing nobody would need me to point it out, and anyone in the Ottawa press gallery with a lick of sense would be able to report properly about the equally stupid Liberal amendments and the stupid and dishonest amended motion the House ended up adopting.

Some of the coverage wasn’t bad, but this sums up the absolute vacuity of the 204-177 majority that voted in favour of it: “We’re entangled in a web of devastation and under pressure to pick sides. We have to condemn both sides.”

Those words were uttered by no less a representative voice on the subject than Foreign Affairs minister Mélanie Joly.

I despair.

Sorry Not Sorry.

Do read my piece in the National Post today. Here is a question I hope occurs to you after reading the piece: Why is British Columbia apologizing for a 1950s-era effort to save 200 children from the fanaticism underlying all the mayhem of those terrible, conveniently-forgotten years?

In this era of establishment apologetics for Canada’s irredeemably sinful legacy of settler colonialism, politicians cannot be trusted as curators of the past. The history departments of Canada’s universities, are no more trustworthy owing to the current predominance of neo-Marxist decolonialist mumbo jumbo in the place where studies of history should be.

The way I put it in the Post: That’s the way it is with apologies like these. They don’t necessarily address the prejudices and injustices they’re intended to remedy, and history tends to get warped and rewritten or moulded and bent to fit prevailing fashion.

It’s this tendency to historical revisionism that deserves attention. It’s profoundly destructive to civic literacy, and to our sense of ourselves as Canadians.

A couple of examples:

Because they were fascists, you numpty

Remember Prime Minister Trudeau’s apology to the Italian-Canadians imprisoned in the Second World War? Here’s my old pal Michael Petrou, writing in the Globe and Mail:

Canada interned hundreds of Italian-Canadians during the Second World War “for the simple reason that they were of Italian heritage,” Liberal MP Angelo Iacono told the House of Commons on April 14, paving the way for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to announce that Canada would formally apologize for doing so in May.

Mr. Iacono’s claim is remarkable. It suggests that Canada perpetrated a massive violation of human rights among members of that ethnic community. But if they really were interned simply because of their heritage, surely tens of thousands must have been thrown into camps – far more than the 12,000 Japanese-Canadians pulled from their homes on the West Coast and interned during the war (in addition to the thousands more forced to work on farms). There were, after all, more than 100,000 Italian-Canadians in 1940.

And yet, if we don’t count the 100 or so Italian sailors in Canada who were caught off guard by Italy’s declaration of war in 1940, the number of internees totals about 500, less than 0.5 per cent of the Italian-Canadian population. There must have been something special about them. What, one wonders, could it have been?

Could it have been that they were Italian fascists who could not be allowed to remain at large in Canada while Canadians were fighting fascists in Italy? That’s a quiz question that’s too easy to get right.

‘What is our name? Mutiny. What is our work? Mutiny.’

Here’s a piece I wrote for the Post about Trudeau’s whole-cloth invention of history in the matter of the Komagata Maru incident, which was supposed to be about a ship of immigrants from India that was cruelly turned away from Vancouver harbour in 1914.

Trudeau’s version: “Those passengers, like millions of immigrants to Canada since, came seeking better lives for their families. Greater opportunities. A chance to contribute to their new home.” And then they were sent away.

This isn’t just revisionism in the syrupy extreme. It’s a vile insult to the memory of all the brave men who put their backs into what was a daring and gallant effort in India’s freedom struggle.

The slogan of the Komagata Maru campaign’s organizers was not: “We choose Canada, please be nice to us.” It was: “What is our name? Mutiny. What is our work? Mutiny.” This was a specific reference to the 1857 Indian insurrection known as the Sepoy Rebellion, named after the British Empire’s native soldiers in India, known as sepoys.

The Komagata Maru incident was a pivotal event in India’s independence movement. It simply was not what Trudeau said it was. Not even close. Here’s what it was about:

A quixotic propaganda-of-the-deed collaboration between the Socialist Party of Canada and the revolutionary Ghadar Movement, the explicit purpose of the effort was to mount a legal challenge to the “continuous passage” immigration regulations that India’s British overlords had persuaded Ottawa to adopt to stem the flight of pro-independence Indian militants to Canada.

The larger aim was to bolster the ranks of insurrectionists plotting India’s emancipation from the relative safety of North America or, failing that, to expose the cruel hoax of equal citizenship in the British Empire, first asserted by the Empress of India, Queen Victoria herself, more than a half-century earlier.

To tell a Trudeau-style story of the Boston Tea Party, you’d have to make it about some Englishmen who had a quarrel at a cricket match about who did or did not spill tea on someone’s lovely white flannels.

The B.C. government’s Freedomite apology doesn’t get quite that weird, but its elisions and occlusions hide a story every bit as cinematic. Stay tuned for this weekend’s big-screen treatment (except in print) about the Freedomite terror times.