My newsletter on Thursday, Are we even allowed to say terrorism? was a kind of prelude to a deeper Real Story treatment of the Spirit Wrestlers, a community of immigrant Russian pacifists who endured a half-century of bigotry, persecution and outright terrorism in Canada that lasted until the early 1980s.
I said it would be done by today. And it is done, but here we are, and it’s already 6:00 Eastern Time. . . so it’ll be in your inbox first thing Monday morning instead. I can pretty well guarantee that most of my subscribers have never heard of this story, or are only vaguely familiar with it, or have been spoon-fed some gluten-free, zero-carbon version of it.
That’s the impression I’m getting so far, going by the response to my last newsletter, and the column I wrote for the Post that started it.
The zeal to hide away stories and ideas that might undermine stories or ideas some establishment nomenklatura doesn’t want you to know about is quite the thing these days.
Like the firing of Cathy Simpson, chief librarian of Niagara-on-the-Lake’s public library. Simpson’s crime was the audacity of thinking out loud about the value of a pluralism of ideas, and a diversity of viewpoints, and the incendiary idea that libraries should be guided by Martin Luther King’s maxim, “We should all be judged by the content of our character, not the color of our skin.”
Or the Surrey school board’s removal from its recommended reading list of the Pulitzer Prize-winner To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian by Sherman Alexie, In the Heat of the Night by John Ball and Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck. Something regarding “concerns about racist content.”
I shouldn’t even have to mention the sinister motives behind the Trudeau government’s Bill C-63 and its expansion of cabinet-appointed tribunal powers to concoct and enforce hate-speech crimes. Because I already have mentioned: Things you’re not allowed to know, and things you’re not allowed to say. See also Stigmatize, Vilify, Detest. Do Not Obey.
The most fascinating stories always seem to be the stories official histories and government-approved versions of events ignore or twist to suit high-fashion sensibilities or expunge from public memory altogether. Odd how that works.
In your inbox, Monday morning: The role that terrorism, the federal government and two provincial governments played in the violent dismemberment of a harmless utopian republic, right here in Canada.
If you’re not a paying subscriber yet, you’ll want to be. Paywall tomorrow.
Your work is worth waiting for. Peace
I do remember the 50s, 60s and 70s.
I will definitely read this issue.