Terrorism, Apologies, and the Abuse of History
The violent dismemberment of a harmless utopian republic in Canada has been erased from official memory. If an apology is due, it's due for that.
Making a virtue out of vandalizing reality
Last Thursday I set out why the British Columbia government’s $10 million apology for “historical wrongs committed by the Province of B.C. against the Sons of Freedom Doukhobor and their families,” whatever good it was meant to serve, is premised on an irresponsibly revisionist history.
Here: Are we even allowed to say "terrorism"?
Just to be clear, I do not mean British Columbia has nothing to apologize for in its treatment of the roughly 8,000 Doukhobor refugees from tsarist Russia who arrived in Canada in the first decade of the 20th century. Quite the opposite. The federal government, too, has much to apologize for in the dissolution of the Doukhobors’ utopian project, as does the Government of Saskatchewan.
The point here is that the British Columbia government has not really apologized at all for the cruel role it played in persecuting the Doukhobors and finishing off their B.C. colonies. Quite the opposite.
There is nothing in the Freedomite apology and its related material that would give you even an inkling of the fact that the Doukhobors were the primary targets and victims of a sustained and spectacularly violent terrorist campaign, the duration and intensity of which is arguably outdone in North American history only by the savage reign of the Ku Klux Klan in the American Deep South.
That’s not just my opinion. That’s how the Freedomite terror times are described by Andrei Bonderoff, himself a Doukhobor, whose Spirited Differences: Doukhobor Sectarianism, Freedomite Terrorism and Government Policy (slow-loading University of Victoria .pdf file here) makes him perhaps the leading living authority on the subject.
The thing is, none of this history shows up in the B.C. government’s apology for “historic wrongs” committed against the Freedomites. It’s as though the half-century of terror the Doukhobors endured never even happened. It wasn’t mentioned by Premier David Eby, or by the local MLAs Katrine Conroy, Brittny Anderson, or Roly Russell. It certainly wasn’t mentioned by Attorney-General Niki Sharma.
Sharma justified her government’s apology this way: “They forcefully took kids away from their parents because they didn’t believe in the beliefs that those people held, that the Sons of Freedom Doukhobors held, and that’s wrong.”
This is not true. It wasn’t the Freedomites’ beliefs that were at issue. Here’s the giveaway.
Specifically, the reason the B.C. government of the day apprehended roughly 200 children from the ramshackle Freedomite redoubt of Krestova was that their parents were either in jail or were refusing to send the children to school, so the kids were kept at school in New Denver between 1953 and 1959. Their parents could have had them back anytime, so long as they agreed to let them go to school. The Freedomites declined. That’s it.
The tell: In all the pronouncements and the polemics attending to the B.C. government’s apology, nowhere is there any mention that even the former tuberculosis sanitorium that was converted to a dormitory in New Denver where the kids were billeted was dynamited by the Freedomites in 1962.
I do not mean to rub salt into old wounds, if you’ll pardon the cliché, but sometimes it’s just an unpardonable offence against civic hygiene and the real world’s stubborn facts to simply let sleeping dogs lie, if you’ll pardon another cliché. I’m not trying to be funny. It’s not funny:
Between the 1920s and the 1960s, Freedomite terror was behind 1,112 "depredations," the deaths of perhaps 20 people and $20 million in damages. The RCMP’s “D Squad” could barely keep up. The RCMP’s files from the City of Nelson and surrounding areas covering the period from 1940 to 1983 run to nine pages of bare bones point-form descriptions in Gregory Cran’s UVic doctoral dissertation, enumerating hundreds of terrorist events and incidents.
Over the course of 1952, for instance, the year before the RCMP swooped in to apprehend those children in Krestova, the Freedomites dynamited power poles in the villages of Blewitt and Taghum. They burned down Castlegar High School, the community hall in the Doukhobor colony of Brilliant, the Appledale Hall, the Krestova Hall, a planing mill near Brilliant and a pipe factory in Kinnaird.
That same year a Great Northern Railway wooden trestled was destroyed by fire. A GNR rail bridge was dynamited. Various houses, businesses, vehicles and a barn were razed in Gilpin, Castlegar and Grand Forks.
The culprits behind the Freedomite terror were a Freedomite minority, it should be said. They tended to be concentrated in Krestova, and were led mostly by Stefan Sorokin, who wasn’t even a Doukhobor, as I mentioned in the Post. The former German Baptist missionary divided his time between Krestova and the safety of his plush digs in Uruguay.
With that throat-clearing out of the way, here are some more stubborn facts about what the Freedomite terrorists were up to in just the six years that their kids were going to school in New Denver, between 1953 to 1959.
They burned down 74 Doukhobor houses in Appledale, Perry Siding, Shoreacres, Winlaw, Glade, Goose Creek and Gilpin. Canadian Pacific Railway lines were dynamited near Carmi and the Boundary substation. “Numerous unexploded bombs were found attached to power poles & rail lines” throughout the Kootenay Mountains.
Post offices in Osoyoos, Oliver and Vernon were dynamited. The CPR rail line was dynamited near the Boundary substation. The CPR tracks were dynamited near Appledale. A gas pipeline was blown up outside Thrums. Power poles were dynamited outside Glade, between Nelson and Salmo, and near Rossland.
A bomb exploded in a locker at the Greyhound bus depot in Nelson. An unexploded bomb was found on the Kelowna ferry. Another unexploded bomb was found in the Allison Hotel beer parlour in Vernon. A railway line near Thrums was dynamited.
The preceding inventory covers a mere seven not-particularly-exceptional years of a Freedomite terror campaign that lasted from the 1920s to the early 1980s. You’d think that some of this would have come up in the B.C. government’s apology to the Freedomites, which, in any case, appears to have had little in the way of a happy effect on their descendants.
But none of it came up. It’s as though it never happened.
But that’s not the half of it.
True enough, it wouldn’t be a simple matter, procuring a proper apology for everything the Government of British Columbia did to the Doukhobors. That’s because of the role the provincial government played in completing what Stefan Sorokin’s guerrilla bombers and arsonists could never have accomplished.
A simple apology wouldn’t really work to atone for the destruction of the strangely magnificent little agrarian civilization of more than 70 villages that was once flourishing between the rainshadow of the Rocky Mountains and the sage desert of the Kettle Valley, roughly between Nelson and Grand Forks. Because what happened is unforgiveable.