We Can Be Heroes, Just For One Day.

Rather than the dirty-money playground for torture state princelings this country has become, Canada could be a champion for the brave and the righteous of the earth.

I’m closing out the week with a tribute of sorts to some of the heroes standing up to the world’s oligarchs, mullahs, autocrats, tyrants and Trudeau Foundation benefactors. Among these heroes are Hongkongers, Russian dissidents, Chinese reformists, Iranians, Venezuelans and Nicaraguans, for starters. Far too many to mention, so here’s just a sampling.

My column yesterday in the National Post and the Ottawa Citizen drew attention to the Russian historian, journalist and patriot Vladimir Kara-Murza: The men who dare defy Vladimir Putin: One by one, Russia’s democratic opposition leaders are being killed or jailed.

I focussed on Kara-Murza because of his speech from the dock this past Monday at the close of his trial for several crimes constituting high treason, stemming merely from statements he has made opposing Vladimir Putin’s bloody war of conquest in Ukraine. The speech, spirited out of the prison where he’s held, is quite something: A reckoning will come.

Kara-Murza is expected to be sentenced this coming Monday. He has already been in prison for a full year. His trial was conducted in secret. Prosecutors are calling for a 25-year sentence in a prison colony. Kara-Murza is among roughly 20,000 Russians who have been arrested since the Kremlin’s barbaric war against Ukrainian people began in February last year.

Vladimir Kara-Murza, unrepentant, unbowed, unashamed: “I subscribe to every word that I have spoken and every word of which I have been accused by this court.”

I come to this subject with a bias and a predisposition that I’m proud to disclose. I’m among the Canadian journalists and politicians who have been barred from Russia and Kara-Murza and I are both among the senior fellows of the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights. On that sort of thing, after you’re done reading this newsletter you might want to scroll back and read this lovely tribute from Columbia University professor Adam Tooze, formerly of Cambridge University, where he was one of Kara-Murza’s teachers.

All of this came rushing back to me when I first heard news of his arrest in early 2022. A series of vivid images of the two of us sitting, quite close together, debating one of his essays. It was a memory, I should say, accompanied by a feeling of guilt. The sense that perhaps in the years afterwards I had neglected this remarkable person. I fear there were emails, many years ago, perhaps to do with his book, unanswered by me. But that is for me and my conscience. I mention it only to ward off even the suggestion of reflected glory. I deserve none. When we started talking, when he was a student in his late teens, he already carried within him a sense of historical motivation which, I now realize, was more intense, more demanding, more self-sacrificing than I will ever bear.

Among the innumerable Russian heroes whose devotion to freedom and basic decency has demanded sacrifice greater than any I will bear are Kara-Murza, Alexei Navalny, Ilya Yashin, and Alexei Gorinov. I focus on them too in my column, and on Boris Nemtsov, who was assassinated eight years ago on the Bolshoy Moskvoretsky bridge in Moscow. And I mention in passing the Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, whose arrest and imprisonment I wrote about last week: As mainstream journalists retreat from covering Russia, digital propaganda fills the void.

I feel a particular affinity with Gershkovich because he genuinely loved Russia and he followed his curiosity thousands of kilometres from Moscow to the Russian Far East. I well remember reading his piece in the Moscow Times three years ago (Salmon Is Disappearing From Russia’s Amur River. It’s Taking Local Tradition With It) because it brought back memories of my own travels to Buryatia, Lake Baikal, Irkutsk, Khabarovsk and the tribal communities along the Amur, the River of the Black Dragon. It’s a place out of time and mind, a strange and tragic reverse mirror of Canada’s west coast that I wrote about for the Globe and Mail years ago: Russia, a land of giant-killers.

I won’t be able to return again, certainly not before Putin’s entire regime is overthrown. And neither can I expect to return any time soon to China, where another hero’s speech was smuggled to the outside world this week.

On Monday, the civil rights activists Xu Zhiyong and Ding Jiaxi were sentenced to 14 years and 12 years in jail, respectively, for the crime of subversion of state power - organizing a small private meeting to discuss the state of civil society in China. Both men have been in and out of prison for several years owing to their association with the “new citizens’ movement,” which was devoted to creating a more open society in China.

Xu’s statement had been dictated to his lawyers - he has not been allowed pen or paper since his arrest - to be published upon his sentencing.

I have a dream, a dream of a China that is beautiful, free, fair, and happy. It is a democratic China that belongs to everyone on this land, not to any one ethnicity or political party. It is truly a country of the people, its government chosen by ballots, not violence. . . A democratic China must be realized in our time, we cannot saddle the next generation with this duty.

When you’re through reading this newsletter I strongly urge you come back to this link and read the whole thing.

Elsewhere:

Arrested and jailed on charges of subversion under the National Security Law Beijing imposed on Hong Kong in 2020, the pro-democracy leader Albert Ho was released on bail last summer after being diagnosed with lung cancer. Three weeks ago, Albert was re-arrested and sent back to prison.

When I spoke with Albert in Hong Kong back in 2016, he saw what was coming. At the time he was the chairman of the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements in China. “We still have limited democracy in Hong Kong and an open society, relatively speaking. Having said that, I cannot say we do not face any risk. China could easily order troops to come in and arrest anyone, under national security. They don’t do it yet, but they could do it.”

And that’s just what Beijing did four years later, crushing Hong Kong’s limited democracy and free press laws and decapitating the city-state’s massive democracy movement in the most sadistic way.

Last month, police arrested the veteran labour union leader Elizabeth Tang after she visited her activist husband Lee Cheuk-yan, who is serving time for unlawful assembly and other offences. Tang was the chief executive of the Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions before the group disbanded itself for security reasons: several of its leaders had been threatened with violence, arrest and death.

More than 200 people have been arrested on charges under the National Security Law, a sadistic instrument that hangs over the heads of all Hong Kongers. Back in February, a trial began for 18 of the 47 pro-democracy activists facing charges under the law for organizing an informal primary in advance of the jerrymandered 2020 election. The 18 defendants face up to life in prison. Last month, two men were arrested for possession of seditious children’s books.

So far as I can determine, everyone I interviewed during my time in Hong Kong is either in jail, on trial or in exile.

None of this is to say we should lose heart. We should not. There is no happily ever after, the arc of history does not always bend towards justice, but the struggle for freedom will never be quenched from the world. Every now and then, even when it’s least expected, the people win.

Now be good and take up a subscription, the paying kind, and here’s something to lift your spirits for the weekend. Crank it up.