Tuesday 28 February 2017

Right,Left and Centre; The Politics of Some Canadians by Dave Jaffe: Chapter 21, Part Three of A Farm Womn's Odyssey.

     A Farm Woman's Odyssey- Part Three by Dave Jaffe.


           In the late 1990's, Moira Sherrington lived alone and her finances weren't in great shape. She had gone bankrupt and lived on welfare for a while. Yet she didn't like it on welfare. In the late 1990's, the then N.D.P. government offered 20,000 welfare recipients the chance to go on disability allowance. Moira was called in to the local welfare office and told she could apply for disability allowance that was quite a bit more generous than a straight welfare cheque.
     "I don't want to go on disability," Sherrington told the welfare officer. "I'm going out to find a job."
     In the late 20th century, Sherrington underwent a massive mind change. She went out and found a job in an office. Her typing and office skills helped her here. She stopped hanging out the places she had when she lived on welfare. She told her friends that she no longer endorsed all left wing politics though she never became a hard cor conservative either.
    "You've got to pick yourself up by your bootstraps,' her farmer father told her when she first went out looking for work at the age of 18. This is what Moira had done. She shed her youthful identities and embraced the hard working ethic of her parents. She became part of the Canadian mainstream
and left behind the left wing dreams that Stanley had told her about .
     Her journey through the realm of ideas was over. She had found what she was looking for.

Saturday 25 February 2017

Right, Left and Centre: The Politics of Some Canadians by Dave Jaffe. Chapter Twenty. Part Two of "A Farm Woman's Odyssey.

    A Farm Woman's Odyssey. Part Two.
    


     When Moira met Stanley, Stanley urged Moira to go to a community college like he was doing. This was a good idea and Moira may have followed his advice. Yet later she insisted that she met Stanley at a community college where she and he were both studying. Whatever the truth, Moira and Stalely took classes together. Here Sherrington discovered her love of literature, the visual arts and women's rights.
    Yet Stanley had one flaw. "He was a cash addict," Sherrington said later. "He'd spend all his money." Also Moira learned that Stanley couldn't hold down a job. Soon she was working and keeping both Stanley and herself. Still, Stanley did teach Moira many useful things. He turned her on to unorthodox therapies and soon Sherrington was delving into her past. She realized that she was full of anger against her mother. She also suspected that her father had molested her.
    Stanley also taught Moira how to get on welfare. She started to live on welfare when she couldn't find a job. She also learned a lot about Stanley's politics as he told her about how the world was set up. His politics sat firmly on the left.  He was an anarchist. He believed that only a revolution could turn Canada into a decent country.Yet he had no time for communists or most social; democrats like the N.D.P.
   "The communists have just build a bureaucratic tyrannies in the Soviet Union and China," he said. "And the social democrats don't believe in real social change. They'll just make a few reforms and then do no more than that." Stanley read the works of the anarchist writer Murray Bookchin where he got many of his ideas. Soon Moira embraced Many of Stan's politics. When she worked she kept these ideas to herself. Yet for a time she too believed in an anarchist revolution. She realized that she had been insulted and injured by society and had been exploited on many of the jobs she's worked at.
     Still, Moira didn't embrace all of Stanley's politics. She admired women who succeeded in Canada like the politician and media star Carole Taylor. She also read magazines about the celebrities and liked the movie star Mia Farrow.
      Yet then things started changing both for her and Stanley. In the 1990's Canada swung to the right. The federal Liberal government of Prime Minister Jean Chretien and his finance minister Paul Martin, made deep cuts to social programs and transfer payments to the provinces. So it became much harder for people to get on the welfare rolls  as the financially strapped government of British Columbia cut back its social services.
   By about 1999, Moira had been on and off welfare for five years. She'd broken off any contact with Stanley who'd started up a business that went bankrupt. Moira had put money into the business and she'd had to declare personal bankruptcy too, just like Stanley had. then Stanley took more money from Moira and then vanished forever. These were bad moments for Moira and she vowed to straighten out her life. She never forgave Stanley for the trouble he had caused her.
     

Thursday 23 February 2017

right, Left and Centre: The Politics of Some Canadians; Chapter 19 - Part One by Dave Jaffe. A Farm Woman's Odyssey.

   A Farm Woman's Odyssey: Part One


     Beatings. That's all that Moira Sherrington can remember about her childhood. Time after time her mother beat her. "I know why now," Sherrington said years later. "I'm dark skinned and so's my mother. No one else in our family is." Her mother hated the colour of her skin and hated herself, Moira figured out. So as a result she beat her daughter.
    Her mother used her hands, her fists and sometimes a paddle she kept in a drawer in the kitchen to hit her younger daughter. Sherrington lived in a farm east of Saskatoon, along with her father, sister and two brothers. Her mother hit her when no one was around. Those beatings hurt. Sometimes the pain was terrible. Yet her mother hit her on her body not on her face. And she hit her daughter when no one was around. So no one else in the family knew about the beatings or at least mentioned them.
   Yet Moira grew. When she was 14 she was as tall as her mother and she started to fight back. Soon her mother couldn't beat her daughter anymore, unless that is she would get beaten up too. By then Moira realized that she and her mother were the only dark skinned people in the family. How this happened Moira never found out. But there it was: Moira and her mother were red in colour. All the rest of the family were whites.
      At the age of 18 Moira graduated from the small high school that lay about five kilometres away. A year later she left her family with no regrets and moved south to Regina. She got a job first with a bank. Then later, she found a job with the provincial government. "You're the fastest typist I've ever seen," one of her supervisors said. She did type fast. She could type close to 100 words a minute. This skill helped her hold down many jobs.
     One day Sherrington saw a picture on t.v. of wintertime Vancouver. There's no snow there, she realized. For a young prairie woman who'd endured many long bone chilling winters, this was great news. She gave up her government job with some regrets for it had paid her well. And on a snowy day in the late 1970's, she got on a train and headed for Vancouver. She left Saskatchewan for good.
    Once in Vancouver, Moira moved into a rooming house. She ended up working as an attendant for sick and older people. She then got a job in a service firm that helped handicapped people. Moira had no trouble paying her bills. Yet sometimes she felt depressed. She started to drink and then stopped. She felt she needed somebody, some man to be with. She already been engaged to be married but her fiance had died. She also felt a great hole somewhere in her mind that she thought must have come from some form of trauma.
   Then along came a man who helped her, though he had his flaws.Stanley was a tall man in his early 30's. Moira was only 22 at the time."I was a revolutionary," Stanley told her. This was true. A few years before, Stanley had led demonstrations against the Vietnam War. He had also lived in communes where he and other young rebels had openly smoked dope and made love. Moira had never met such a person like Stanley. For quite a time, she felt happy.
    

Tuesday 21 February 2017

Right, Left and Centre: The Politics of Some Canadians. Chapter 18, Part Three. by Dave Jaffe

    25 Years in the N.D.P. Part Three. by Dave Jaffe


    Ted Jasper had some bad  experiences when he was in the N.D.P., but  as he said after leaving the party, "Being in the N.D.P. overall was a growth experience." He learned all about elections and how they were run. He saw how B.C.'ers voted and that helped him know more about the province. He helped elect some fine candidates and the N.D.P. did win three provincial elections during the time he was active in the party. All the three N.D.P. governments did do many good things, especially the government led by premier Dave Barrett. Barrett was the first N.D.P. premier of British Columbia and he and his government introduced many fine programs.
    At the same time that Jasper helped the N.D.P., he also joined a few anti-poverty groups and enjoyed working with these groups also movements too.
     Yet then in the 1990's, the Canadian political system shifted to the right. The new federal Liberal government of Prime Minister Jean Chretien and his Finance Minister Paul Martin cut social programs to the bone. As a result, the N.D.P. provincial government, led by premier Mike Harcourt, scaled back welfare payments.
    Tommy Douglas, the legendary C.C.F. premier of Saskatchewan, once said of his longtime Liberal rival Jimmy Gardiner, "The man had but one passion and that was power itself." Suddenly Ted Jasper woke up. He realized he'd been seeing the N.D.P. through a hazy golden screen as a perfect party. Now he realized that the N.D.P. party leaders were obsessed with power too. How else to explain the N.D.P .lowering the boom on the poorest of the poor? Yet Jasper may have overreacted here. Under the short time period when Ujjal Dosanjh was premier of B.C., the N.D.P. reversed some of the welfare cuts that the Harcourt government had made.
      Back then, the minister responsible for social services Moe Sihota put 20,000 welfare recipients on  disability allowance. They then received quite a bit more money every month. This was definitely a change for the better for the poorest British Columbians. Yet by then Jasper had left the N.D.P. He also walked out of the anti-poverty group that he volunteered for. Here too he had caused quite a few problems.
    In any case in 1995 and 1996, Jasper left behind a commitment that had swallowed up many years of his life. He started to study subjects that he knew nothing about, like economics, biology, statistics and political science. "I was ignorant of these things," he said later. "I wasn't stupid but I knew little about these important subjects." Edward Jasper freed himself from his political illusions, although he still saw himself as a progressive. In his later years he did find happiness but not in the world of politics   
     In the spring of 1997 a then middle aged man sat on a bench in the small town of Hope. Here the mighty Fraser River swings west towards the Salish Sea, a few hundred kilometres to the west. This 55 year old man was happy. "I'm finished with politics," Ted Jasper told himself. "I caused many problems in the N.D.P. and the anti-poverty movement. "
    Political parties and anti-poverty work, Jasper realized, brought out the bad sides of his character. "But that was my fault," Jasper said to others later on. "It wasn't the fault of the organizations I belonged to. Still and all I'm glad to be on my own again." And he was definitely a happier man.
    
   
     
   

Monday 20 February 2017

Right, Left and Centre: The Politics of Some Canadians. 25 Years in the N.D.P. by Dave Jaffe. Chapter 17, Part Two.

     25 Years in the N.D.P. Part Two.

      Ted Jasper was the son of a cablevision salesman who was an intense working class Englishman from East End London. His mother was an upper middle class Englishwoman who had had an anxious character. Some of that anxiety was passed on to her son.
     Ted became partly handicapped in his early 30's. Like his father Ted had a terrible temper and like his dad he talked far too much. Jasper also ended up arguing with many people. Here too he was like his father who he grew up disagreeing with on many issues. All around him in the early 1970"s, there were other leftists he met. There were Maoists, anarchists, Trotskyists and Communists. Jasper ended up arguing with them all. He was also an abuser who abused men and especially women.
     "You were crazy when I knew you in the early 1970's," a former workmate of Jasper's told him when the two men met again years later. Jasper agreed.  In the late 1970's, Jasper went into therapy and tried to tone down his neuroses. Sometimes he succeeded but often his anxiety surfaced.
     Not only that, Jasper didn't want to get involved with the feuds and factions that plagued the N.D.P. back then. "Nobody trusts you," a high level N.D.P..'er told him. Another N.D.P. member said that Jasper was the slipperiest slimiest person he'd met in the party. Again Jasper had to admit to himself that this may have been partly true.
    Jasper was only really happy in the N.D.P.  when he was canvassing at election time. Here he took a page out of his father's life. He sold social democracy, he once said while his father sold cablevision. Yet his father had more success selling cablevision than his son had peddling the N.D.P. line. The B.C. N.D.P. sat in opposition for many years, losing one election after another to the right wing Social Credit Party and later to the conservative Liberals.
    To compound his problems, Jasper never found a career. Hobbled by his disability that caused him great pain in his knees, Jasper never found a career. He drifted from teaching to journalism at small papers to anti-poverty work. Sometimes he ended up on welfare. Yet he remained an N.D.P.'er and the few people who knew him in the party did like him as a canvasser.
     In his time in the party Jasper met many Members of the Legislative Assembly and some Members of Parliament. Most of these people were nice to him though there were exceptions. One man he met seemed to be schizophrenic. The first time Jasper met him, the man was arrogant, abusive and very irritable. The second time they met, the man was charming and very nice. "That man is strange," Jasper remarked to another N.D.P. member. The other N.D.P. member observed that the man was gay and was trying to hide it."He's under great pressure," the man told Jasper. "If I were you I'd stay away from him." Jasper followed this advice. 
    Another politician was very nice to Ted when he was raising money for the man. After that he never spoke to Ted again. One woman politician seemed like a nice person when she was climbing up the political ladder. Later she developed a very condescending character and talked to Jasper as if he was some form of low life. Jasper got used to the varied people he met in the N.D.P. and didn't let the encounters with  a few unkind politicians shake his faith in the N.D.P.  He remained committed to the party.        
    

Saturday 18 February 2017

Right, Left and Centre: The Politics of Some Canadians: by Dave Jaffe. Chapter 16 - Twenty Five Years in the N.D.P.

    25 Years in the N.D.P. - Part One


     A 29 year old man wandered into a church basement in Vancouver's West End one week night in the fall of 1971. This short stocky young man was going to his first New Democratic Party meeting. Yet it didn't turn out as he thought it would.
    A s soon as he sat down on one of the many wooden chairs arrange in rows, a 20ish woman came towards him. "What do you think of our new leader?" she asked him right away. "I think Dave Barrett is doing a good job," Edward 'Ted' Jasper replied. "He's getting out to the burbs , into the interior and on the Island to send out an N.D.P. message. I like him.
     "I don't think he's doing much at all," the woman said. Suddenly an older man came forward. "This man Barrett shouldn't be leading our party at all," he just about shouted. "He didn't win the leader's role in an open contest." Jasper was amazed. Is this how N.D.P. members talk about their leader, he wondered. "You people are out of it," he said. "I could be a reporter for a local paper and tomorrow the paper would have a headline on its front page saying something like 'Disunity plagues the N.D.P.'"
   The two dissenters faded into the background when Dave Barrett showed up. Along with him came the now retired B.C. Lions football player and N.D.P. candidate Emery Barnes. Ted Jasper could never recall what either of these two politicians said. Yet when he left the N.D.P. 25 years later he remembered the two dissenters who didn't like Barrett. Somehow, he thought that exchange he had with them, typified the B.C. N.D.P.
     Edward Jasper had never been in a political party before. He joined the N.D.P. because a friend of his, who was active in the party asked him to join. Then he heard Dave Barrett speak a few months later at a meeting in downtown Vancouver. Barrett was a great orator and his speech turned Jasper on. That speech convinced him to take part in the next election campaign of 1972. Yet this was quite a stretch for a man who a few years before, used to go around McGill University where he went to school, saying "I'm apolitical. I don't care about politics."
    After he left the N.D.P. Jasper realized that the should have stayed away from the political scene. He got too involved in the N.D.P. he realized and he also thought that he didn't have the right personality for politics. "Politics bought out the worst side of my character," Jasper told someone after he left the political scene. "But that was my fault. It was not the fault of politics."
  

Thursday 16 February 2017

Right,Left and Centre: The Politics of Some Canadians: Chapter 15, by Dave Jaffe

   The Enemy of China- by Dave Jaffe: PartThree.
 

     The People's Republic of China that Dorothy Pride was intent on changing for the better surely didn't stand out as a shining example of respect for human rights. Most power was concentrated in the hands of the Communist Party whose leader Xi Jinping made most of the important decisions affecting his Chinese subjects. Every year at least 1,000 people were execute for crimes. The government often sold off people's organs without their consent. Close to 450 Chinese villages and towns were terribly polluted and many people in these places died of cancer.
    The Chinese government in the past 60 years had probably killed over one million Tibetan people. It had also persecuted Moslems in the region of Xinjiang. Meanwhile it threw millions  of farmers off their lands to make way for factories and industrial plants. Many Chinese had rioted in reaction to these top-down decisions. "There were 6,000 disturbances in China last year," Pride said in the first decade of the 21st century.
     Pride deluged the Chinese government with requests to let many Chinese political prisoner go free. She clashed with one Canadian Member of Parliament who had refused to help one man's family when they requested that this M.P. help get their family member out of a Chinese prison. She crossed swords with the American dissident Noam Chomsky. "Are you an agent of the C.I.A?" Chomsky asked her. Pride denied this and had no time for Chomsky. She also criticized other M.P.'s for not working hard enough.
    In any case Pride had found an enemy to confront and tangle with. Not all the people who didn't like China's government agreed with what she was doing. "I'm not in favour of writing letters or sending e-mails to overseas countries," said Rodger, a British Columbian who lived on Vancouver Island. "I think you should start changing things at home."
     Dorothy Pride surely didn't agree with this opinion. Her energies may have been misplaced but you can't ignore her commitment. "The Chinese government is terrible," she said. "I'm going to spend the rest of my life trying to bring it down."


    

Tuesday 14 February 2017

Left, Right and Centre: The Politics of Some Canadians: Chapter 14: Part Two by Dave Jaffe

    One Woman Against China - Part Two


     Dorothy Pride was always active in the field of human rights. In the 1970's, she showed up at the deportation hearings of Leonard Pelletier. Pelletier was the Sioux First Nations man who fled to Canada in the mid-1970's to escape criminal charges of killing two F.B.I. agents. In the end he was sent back to the U.S. and is still in prison there. Pride also helped a United Church minister who was thrown out of the church after he uncovered the crimes committed in the residential schools.
    When Pride went to see another United Church minister about this case, the minister told her, "No I won't help you or this man. You want to destroy the United Church and I won't let that happen."
     Pride got old helping people in prison. Yet she would never criticize Canada, the U.S. or any democratic country. "Democracy is too precious to criticize," she said. So when the U.S. invaded Iraq or when Israeli soldiers shot and killed Palestinians, Pride remained silent. She seemed to ignore or had not even heard what Christopher Lasch once said in effect. "Communists kill people inside their countries. Capitalist democracies kill people outside their borders." If the word 'tyrants' is used in place of 'communists' Lasch's statement is still true.
    As Pride aged her politics moved firmly to the right. She told a man who defended feminism, "Feminists are crazy  and you John are a bleeding heart liberal who always defends the underdog." The underdog, John replied, is sometimes right. Pride also thought that all First Nations reserves should be sold off. She supported austerity in Europe even though the austerity measures  imposed hunger and suffering on tens of millions of Europeans. She spoke glowingly of Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper when he considered cutting off al trade links with China.
     Meanwhile in the 1990's and later, Canada's economy worked well but only for the rich. Homeless people piled up in the streets. Public education continued to decay while Dorothy's  grandchildren went to private schools. Governments gave massive subsidies to energy companies while firmly holding down the wages of nearly all government workers. The free trade deals that Canada signed in the 1980's and 1990's gave multinational firms the right to take over massive amounts of the Canadian economy. Welfare benefits were pitiful and most jobs that were created were often part time with no pensions or medical benefits.
     "I don't call the working class 'a proletariat' now," one economist said. "I call it a 'precariat' because working people are now living very precarious lives." Somehow Dorothy Pride didn't seem to see any of these things. Now in the 21st century she focused her energies on mainly denouncing China. She refused to denounce any democratic country, even her own.
     
   

Friday 10 February 2017

Left, Right and Centre: Chapter 13 by Dave Jaffe: One Woman Against China - Part One.

 One  Woman Against China - Part One


        Some people spend the last years of their life lying down in bed, alone or with somebody else. Others fly around the world one last time before their health gives out. Some just go to 'Starbucks' every day and then go home to watch t.v. or take care of their grandchildren.
    Then there's Dorothy Pride. "My aim is to bring down the Chinese government," says Pride a 70ish grandmother of three grand children. Will she succeed? It's doubtful but who can tell? Pride was born in India in the late 1930's. "There were 67 servants in our house," she says. "I did have a lovely childhood."
    Dorothy loved her mother but adored her father who was a doctor. He was working for the British government that back then ruled India. Yet Pride's family that was made up of her, her brother, sister and her parents were living in the last days of the British rule of India. In 1947 the family left India and settled in Atlantic Canada. Dorothy's father became head of mental services in an Atlantic province and the whole family got used to the bracing eastern Canadian climate.
    Pride was a brilliant student. She won a scholarship to the University of London. In the late 1950's she got an advanced degree in English literature. "It wasn't a Ph.D," she later said regretfully. "And that cost me a lot of money later on." Then she married an engineer who had a wandering eye. They moved to Atlanta, Georgia. Here, she met Martin Luther King Junior, and his wife Coretta Scott King. She helped raise money for civil rights groups  and worked in the same building that King did.
     At that time Atlanta was a fiercely racially divided city. Quite a few times, white southern men phoned Dorothy at home to threaten her. "You filthy bitch," one man told her. "We know you're sleeping with black men. We're going to kill you." Yet this short blonde woman was very brave. She kept doing her job and stayed in Atlanta for about 18 months. Then she and her husband moved north to New York City.
     Here she met some movers and shakers. She became committed to the United Nations, a loyalty she held to in the 1990's. She and her husband also lived in Pakistan and India. "India was lovely," Dorothy said."I never liked Pakistan." Dorothy came back to Canada in the late 1960's. She was now a mother with two growing sons. She and her husband split up and Dorothy ended up in Vancouver.
      In this coastal city, Dorothy set up the first British Columbian chapter of 'Amnesty International'. She taught English at the University of British Columbia for a very low wage. Here at UBC she met the young Michael Ignatieff, who one day would lead the federal Liberal Party of Canada. He would say to Dorothy, "There's an interesting idea you should look at Dorothy." Then he would sketch out his latest intellectual find. Finally one day Dorothy replied, "I'm busy Michael. I've got children to look after and a job. Why don't you do it?"
   Ignatieff went back east but Dorothy stayed. She bought and sold houses often making money in the process. Yet she still kept working on 'Amnesty International' issues.
    


    

Tuesday 7 February 2017

Right, Left and Centre: Chapter 12 by Dave Jaffe

      
    The Critical Critic - Part Four.


       The critical critic couldn't support Israel anymore. So in the end he settled on supporting the French-Canadians. They were people who survived. They didn't use violence, at least not in 2010. By 2010, the Quebec sovereigntist movement was shrinking. After its near victory in the 1995 referendum the Quebec sovereigntist movement splintered into three groups. There was the separatist Parti Quebecois, the soft nationalists of the Coalition for the Future of Quebec and the very left wing Operation Solidaire.
    "The Quebec separatist movement is history," one former Quebec resident said. True or not, sthe critic admired the Quebec nationalists. He wondered why the film 'Barney's Version', which was based on Mordecai Richler's novel of the same name, never showed people speaking in French.  He also wondered why so many people in Quebec, including Mordecai Richler had never learned French. He noticed how many English Canadians didn't like Quebec at all.
       The critical critic was now a supporter of  French Canadian nationalism. He was happy. He'd found a new cause to believe in. It was called 'Quebec'. And he had a new target to criticize. It was called 'English Canada'. At the age of 67 the crtical crtic was once again a happy man.

Right, Left and Centre: The Politics of Some Canadians - Part 12 by Dave Jaffe: The Crititcal Critic - Part Four.

    The Critical Critic - Part Four.


       The critical critic couldn't support Israel anymore. So in the end he settled on supporting the French-Canadians. They were people who survived. They didn't use violence, at least not in 2010. By 2010, the Quebec sovereigntist movement was shrinking. After its near victory in the 1995 referendum the Quebec sovereigntist movement splintered into three groups. There was the separatist Parti Quebecois, the soft nationalists of the Coalition for the Future of Quebec and the very left wing Operation Solidaire.
    "The Quebec separatist movement is history," one former Quebec resident said. True or not, sthe critic admired the Quebec nationalists. He wondered why the film 'Barney's Version', which was based on Mordecai Richler's novel of the same name, never showed people speaking in French.  He also wondered why so many people in Quebec, including Mordecai Richler had never learned French. He noticed how many English Canadians didsn't like Quebec at all.
   

Monday 6 February 2017

right, Left and Centre: The Politics of Some Canadians: Part Eleven. The Crtical Crtic - Part Three

     The Critical Critic - Part Three


    So by the early 21st century, the critical critic was yet another somewhat conservative Canadian, albeit one with a Jewish slant. He put down people on the left, supported Israel, and had little time for 1960's rebels or any rebels. Yet he did admire the Civil Rights movement and its leader the late Martin Luther King Junior.
      The critic had money. His mother had left him a reasonable amount when she died. He grew this sum. He never worked after his early 30's and lived in a modest apartment in downtown Toronto. He travelled across North America and around Europe. He studied architecture and wrote glowing letters about his journeys. "You could have been a good travel journalist,' someone told him. Yet this would have meant meeting people and making friends.This the critic couldn't do.
     The deaths of his stepfathers had taught him to stay away from people. If he got too close to a person, that person could die. And he never wanted to feel the pain of separation again. So he lived in Toronto for over 40 years and never made any close friends. It was a solitary life but not a bad one. Yet then something happened.
    The critical critic re-visited Israel. He'd been there twice before. Once as mentioned in the late 1950's and then again in the early 1970's. On his second visit he caught hepatitis and had to come back to Canada to be cured. After this visit he became more conservative and a fierce critic of the 1960's counterculture that he had once admired.
     Now in the 21st century, he found a totally different Israel. The country had shucked off its left leaning image. Kibbutzim had disappeared. Social programs had been slashed. Shrewd ruthless business people now ruled the economy. The religious right had grown in strength. Meanwhile transplanted russian Jews moved the country's politics rightward.
   On Israel's West Bank, Israeli armies pushed Arabs aside to make way for Israeli settlers. On the country's west side of Gaza, big Palestinian settlements had sprung up. Yet most of the people there were poor. They supported extremist groups like Hamas. From time to time, they fired rockets into Israel, killing one or two Israelis. Yet the Israeli forces would then strike back, often killing dozens of Arabs, The critical critic realized that times had changed.
    "I don't like the way Israel has turned out," he said. "I don't like what Israel has become." Yet the critic wasn't naive. He knew that most of Israel's neighbours loathed the country. If Israel lost one battle it could be destroyed. The critic went home. He thought about what he'd seen. Then he stopped admiring Israel. Yet who could he admire? Certainly no one on the left because he was a centrist if not sometimes a conservative. Then another group of people popped up on his radar screen, namely the French Canadians.
    
    
    

Saturday 4 February 2017

Right, Left and Centre, Part Ten: by Dave Jaffe: The Crtical Critic - Part Two

   The Critical Critic - Part Two by Dave Jaffe


    "You can drive yourself crazy reading Jewish history," the critical critic once said. Certainly he nearly drove himself crazy. He used to criticize Karl Marx, not because Marx was a revolutionary but because Marx who was the son of Jews, didn't like Jews. The critic surely held different ideas than the vast majority of Canadians, at least on some issues. As a result he often got into some intense arguments with people.
     The critic was a strong Zionist.  He went to a Jewish day school as a child, and immersed himself in Jewish history. He read books like 'They Were All Jews' which highlighted the lives of famous Jews. When he was in his mid-teens, the critic went with a group of other young Jewish students to Israel. He fell in love with this tiny country. He visited kibbutzim, listened closely to Israeli army people,  and wandered up and down the streets of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, entranced by this new country which was only ten years old.
    The critic loathed Palestinian leaders like Yasir Arafat. He also had no time for Quebec sovereigntists.. "The man's a complete demagogue," the critic said of Pierre Bourgault, the leader of the sovereigntist Gathering for National Independence, an early 1960's forerunner of the Parti Quebecois. The critic knew the troubled history of Jews in Quebec. Jews and French Canadians often clashed. Anti-semitism flourished in Quebec from about 1900 to 1945. Power wielders like the theologian Lionel Groulx and French speaking Catholic priests put down Jews all the time.
     In the 1930's and 1940's, anti-Semitic French speaking crowds often attacked Jews in Montreal's east end. A young Pierre Elliot Trudeau wrote a play attacking Jews. Many French Canadians objected in both world wars to fighting Germany. Still, many French Canadians did go overseas in wartime and quite a few died on European battlefields.
    As the French Canadians modernized, many of them turned to the sovereigntist Parti Quebecois in the 1970's. Many Jews got scared. Thousands of English speaking Jews fled Montreal in the 1970's and 1980's. "They hate us," many Jews said once more about French Canadians. Mordecai Richler wrote a best selling book called 'O Canada, O Quebec' that was based on a series of articles he wrote for'The New Yorker'.
      Richler drew a straight line between the Quebec anti-semitism of the past like that of Lionel Groulx's, and the nationalsim of the Parti Quebecois. "They're both cut from the same cloth," Richler seemed to be saying. The critical critic agreed. In the mid-1960's he left Montreal and after some journeys he ended up in Toronto. He had no time for the Parti Quebecois.
     Wherever he went, the critic met people who loathed Jews or Israel or both. "When I lived in New York City," a Vanouver-based journalist told him, "all you had to do to insult a person is call them a Jew. That was a real put down." Another man in Vancouver, a Jew used to criticize Israel on the local co-op radio. The critic also turned against the New Left of the 1960's.  "All they do is put down Israel," he said. He thought John Lennon of the Beatles may have been an anti-Semite because Lennon kept calling Bob Dylan by his real name, namely 'Robert Zimmerman'.  The critic also had no time for feminism.
     
    

Thursday 2 February 2017

Right, Left and Centre: The Politics of Some Canadians: Part Nine. The Crtiical Critic.

         Right, Left and Centre: Part Nine: The Critical Critic:


         A few people who knew him used to call him "The critical critic" for that's what he was. He spent a large part of his life criticizing critics, especially those on the left.
    "Noam Chomsky sees all power wielders as evil," the critical critic used to say. "That's just not true." When religious men and women used the Gospels or other parts of the Bible to call for justice, the critic objected. "Religion,": he said, "supports the status quo. You can't use it to change the world to make it more equal."
    A tall, uneasy looking man, the critic had been a good football player in his youth. "He had a great pair of hands," one of his childhood  friends recalled. The critic was adopted. as a child. In east end Montreal in the early 1950's, he would drive his tiny three wheeler along Hutchinson street in spring time at a furious speed. He was living in Mordecai Richler territory. For like Richler the critic was a Jew. In the mid-1950's, his parents moved to Outremont, a more middle class area which was further west than Hutchinson street.
    Here disaster struck his family. His cheerful stepfather died of a heart attack. "He was a smoker,' the critic said. His father keeled over in his dress factory and was gone. He was only 48 years old. His mother a short plump bookkeeper married again. Yet her new husband wasn't a nice man. He used to hit and abuse the critic.
     Yet then this man died.. "He was a smoker too," the critic recalled. "And he didn't do any exercise." So the critic's second stepfather died also from a heart attack. He wasn't even fifty years old. Now the critic turned in on himself. He idealized himself before the age of eight, in other words before his first stepfather died. He never fell in love with a woman and he didn't like schools either.
    By the age of about 16 the critic had become a Jewish tribalist. He went to university and graduated after a while. Yet he spent large parts of his free time reading about Jewish history and the Holocaust. He loathed Germans of course. He also became paranoid about anti-Semitism and saw it everywhere. Of course this isn't hard to do since it's quite easy to find some people anywhere who don't like Jews.
    In the world to-day anti-Semitism is quite strong in Moslem countries and weaker in many western lands. Still, there's people who dislike Jews all over the world. And the results of this dislike for Jews has led to terrible results. "The history of Jews," one rabbi pointed out, "is often a history of suffering." Wherever Jews have lived, they've been persecuted. The only exception here is India. Yet in most parts of the world, wherever Jews have shown up, people have unleashed hatred and violence against them.
   Many famous writers have hated Jews as have many politicians, including of course, Adolf Hitler who spawned the Holocaust, Argentina's Juan Peron, Quebec's famous theologian Lionel Groulx and England's famous king of the Middle Ages,Richard the Lionheart.