Canada and Other Matters of Opinion (11 page)

And as is the case in the bombing of the Talmud Torah library in Montreal, they also feel that tormenting and intimidating Jews anywhere is an earned licence because of where they stand on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. So we have swastikas on Jewish homes in placid Toronto, we have the upsurge in assaults on Jews in Europe, and we have all too frequently, in demonstrations almost everywhere in the world, the placards and chants equating Israel and its government with its own demonic anti-type, the Nazism of Adolf Hitler.

We have, in effect, the Holocaust thrown in the face of the people who were its targets. I salute the prime minister for the civic nobility of what he had to say, but by attempting to generalize what happened in Montreal yesterday, he has in effect diffused its horror. It was a piece of hatred for the Jews of Montreal. It was an expression on Canadian soil of that simmering anti-Semitism that takes some camouflage, some protective colouring from asserting a solidarity with the Palestinian cause.

Anti-Semitism, springing from whatever source, is the most toxic political virus in the world. That’s something we’ve already learned in that other school—the school where six million went to their death.

Fidel Castro’s parlous condition this week brought me to an online review of a film biography of him.
Fidel
was released in 2002, and it is clear early on that the reviewer, A.O. Scott, was not too impressed by filmmaker Estela Bravo’s enthusiasm for her subject.

I detected a skeptical gleam, for example, in this line: “This is an exercise not in biography but in hero worship.”

Nonetheless, hero worship of Fidel Castro, however perplexing, is despairingly common. Over the forty-seven years of Castro’s dictatorship, whole contingents of Hollywood types have given themselves over to Castro idolatry, which—considering his regime is a one-party state solidly in the mould of every one-party state that has ever been—is odd even for the moralists of Bel Air.

But then, Castro, much like his early colleague in revolution and arms, Che Guevara, has always—bizarrely, in my view—possessed an unfathomable fashionability among the sophisticated and “right-thinking” classes. No less than our own Pierre Trudeau seemed to have harboured an affection for the Communist tyrant. It is possible, in Mr. Trudeau’s case, his dalliances with the dictator answered to some private amusement, that he (Mr. Trudeau) knew how much breaking bread with Fidel annoyed the mandarins of the U.S. State Department and the Nixon White House.

However, it was always a QED too far for me to understand how the mature Mr. Trudeau’s visceral and intellectual
commitments to civil liberties and the primacy of the individual ever comported with, in logic or morality, toasting an island despot, a leader who had embraced the demonstrably evil creed of communism.

It is, of course, their status as icons of anti-Americanism that mainly accounts for Fidel and Che’s (harsh and harsher) durability in the fashionable mind. Anti-Americanism is the plenary indulgence of all progressive thought. But let us return to the Scott review.

From it, I quote: “At one point, the American novelist Alice Walker, with sublime soft-headedness, marvels that Mr. Castro cannot dance or sing. ‘It’s a good thing he’s got all those other good qualities,’ she says.”

Mr. Scott doesn’t let that go entirely without remark: “This is about the harshest criticism Ms. Bravo permits, and one wonders just which good qualities Ms. Walker had in mind. The persecution of homosexuals? The silencing of political opposition? The jailing of dissidents?”

All justifiable queries, we will agree. But the line that stopped me cold was one A.O. Scott, wickedly, buried in parentheses just before these questions, and in all its glory is as follows: “(Later, she compares him to a redwood tree.)”

I think we have here a landmark moment in ecology as revelation. Novelists are the artists of our time, so we’re told. They penetrate the surface, they unravel the hidden connections or speak the unheard messages of our age. Alice Walker is a novelist, and Fidel Castro reminds her of
a tree. It would be interesting to hear her take on Tito. A dogwood, perhaps? So much for the art of the novel.

As I write this, the redwood, er, the Supreme One, is recovering from an operation, and his condition is a “state secret.” (Maybe they’re counting the rings.)

No surprise there. Dictatorships and health bulletins on the dictator are not compatible entities. (Let us not even explore the topic of dictatorships and death certificates.) In shrouding his decay or passing, Mr. Castro is merely maintaining one item of a desiccated liturgy.

But when he shuffles off this mortal coil, we should all be prepared for a full flood of kindly reminiscence and adulatory appraisal. There will be much talk of the wonderful Cuban health care system. And there will be much talk of the wonderful Cuban health care system.

Because embracing the second-most malevolent political system of the last century, and maintaining that embrace for close on four decades after its hideous innards were exposed for all the world to see—after Alexander Solzhenitsyn, after Andrei Sakharov, after the labours of Robert Conquest—must be counterbalanced by something, anything, that may be said to tend toward the humane and benign. The Cuban health care system has performed that dubious service for as long as Castro has held supreme rule in Cuba. It is a toy of an excuse.

Dictatorship is as much an insult as a horror. It is a fundamental insult to the people it rules, an insult to their dignity, to their honour and to their souls. Wrap it any way
you wish—compare him to a redwood—but Mr. Castro was a dictator.

Hospitals can be named after him from here to eternity, it will never change the fact he never trusted the people he ruled to make a single real choice over who led them.

Mocking the absolute misery of another human being has to be—next to deliberately and wantonly designing that misery—the lowest of human behaviours.

Mocking the misery, torment and death of six million human beings, therefore, belongs to some unspeakable category of epic depravity.

What form, what shape, would the keenest of such mockery take? Would it be to jeer publicly and laugh at the torments and death of so many, to take open delight at the nearly unimaginable pain and terror visited on so many?

To cheer the misery of millions would surely be an offence to scorch the ears of hell itself. But, if you are a Jew, I suspect that the last and perfect insult, the one that surpasses even open mockery of the Holocaust—its last cruelty, so to speak—is to say there was no Holocaust.

And yet, here we are, barely six years out of the bleak century forever stained by Adolf Hitler’s near-extermination
of European Jewry in the great murder factories of the concentration camps, and the president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, hosts a “conference” on the “myth” of the Holocaust. He assembles a clutch of “scholars” to launch an inquiry into the Holocaust, most eminent among whom is that paragon of erudition and dispassionate inquiry, a veritable Causabon-under-a-white-sheet, the former Ku Klux Klanner David Duke. Dr. Duke, as he pretentiously styles himself, may be a depleted merchant of old and expired hatreds in North America, but he’s the headline guest and revered scholar at the conference in the soon-tobe-nuclear Iran.

Lesser Aristotles include Robert Faurisson, a French professor who denies the existence of the gas chambers; an Australian, Michele Renouf, who hails Mr. Ahmadinejad as a hero just for holding the conference, and another Australian, Frederick Toben, who delivered to the assembled illuminati this ferocious particular: “The number of victims at the Auschwitz concentration camp could be about 2,007.” The use of “about” in that sentence is amazing.

There was also a Canadian professor, Shiraz Dossa from St. Francis Xavier University, who evidently travelled to this zoo of mountebanks unawake to the thought that a conference called to discuss the myth of the Holocaust would be a gathering dedicated to the idea of the Holocaust as a myth. When the news broke that the professor was attending this festival of blight, he lamented that the gathering was full of “hacks and lunatics” and that he
wouldn’t even “shake hands with most of them.” One can only hope for the students of St. F.X. that Professor Dossa is not teaching either logic or holiday planning.

The target of it all, as it always is, was Israel and the Jews. For Mr. Ahmadinejad, the nearly illimitable suffering of the six million is a Jewish lie. On state television, he proclaimed: “They [the Jews] have fabricated a legend under the name Massacre of the Jews, and they hold it higher than God himself, religion itself and the prophets themselves.” The same Mr. Ahmadinejad, who mocks and derides the historical Holocaust, opens this demented seminar with the clear promise of one soon to come: “The Zionist regime will be wiped out soon, the same way the Soviet Union was, and humanity will achieve freedom.” He has so often proclaimed that Israel will be “wiped off the map” that the phrase hardly needs quotation marks. But note, too, how he links Israel’s eradication with humanity, all humanity, “achieving freedom.”

The death of Israel—i.e., the death of Jews—as millennial panacea, the removal of the one impediment to universal harmony—where have we heard this before? We are not far, not far by one inch, from the racist dogmas that found such terrible audience in 1930s Germany. The Jew now, as then, is always out of scale—in power, in insidiousness, in perniciousness to the common good of mankind.

“If somebody in their country questions God, nobody says anything,” Mr. Ahmadinejad said. “But if somebody
denies the myth of the massacre of Jews, the Zionist loudspeakers and the governments in the pay of Zionism will start to scream.”

This is anti-Semitism’s latest diabolic twist. The Holocaust was powered by the great lie of the Jewish world conspiracy, and now the Holocaust itself is another “Jewish conspiracy.” Anti-Semitism as the snake that swallows its own tail. The malice here is profound. While most of the sane world looked upon this conference as deranged and hateful, and many worthy people said as much, hatred and mockery of Israel and the Jews has become so common that this outlandish gathering in Tehran this week seemed almost ordinary, predictable.

Let us recall that was Arendt’s reading of Eichmann: ordinary, predictable, banal.

A recent immigrant to Canada—Toronto, to be particular—is another in the grim chain of innocent people gunned down on this city’s streets and in one horrible case, even on school property. His name was Hou Chang Mao.

What was Hou Chang Mao engaged in when some miserable waste of breath let loose the bullet that took all the rest of Mr. Hou’s hopeful, honourable life away from him, and him away from his two—now wretched and terribly grieving—children? Why, the reckless new citizen was outside a fruit store on a main street in this great multicultural city, stacking oranges in a crate. It’s still a truth that newcomers to this country start at the bottom, do long and dreary work, sacrifice for the next generation of their children—work hard, and play by the rules, to use the stiff phrase—and Hou Chang Mao was a model of that extremely benign and, to my mind, extremely honourable stereotype.

Mr. Hou’s death is really hard to take. He had just come back from China, where he’d gone to bring his (now weeping) eighteen-year-old daughter to join him and his twenty-three-year-old (now tormented) son. What a horrific somersault for that young woman—to come to this fresh, vital, safe country, and barely here, when her father, at nothing more than stacking oranges in a crate outside a grocery store, is shot down by some menacing coward.

It should make us shudder to consider what she thinks of this country now. What a brutal twist this story puts to
this man’s hopes and dreams. How hard was it for him to get here in the first place? What were his visions of this country before he arrived? What had he told his children? How can they now square all that he had told them then with the image of their father dead on a Toronto sidewalk? For that matter, in some wide sense, how can we?

The next day, his son was brave enough to try to say, through a translator, a few things about this callous and empty slaughter, and the sight of him and his grieving sister trying to balance shock and grief, their visible, astonished pain at a dream turned upside down, would melt stone.

I suppose it’s pointless to ask if those who execute the innocent and the harmless, who by their idiot violence create widows and orphans, ever really contemplate how perfectly selfish and egotistical they are. Their squabbles over moronic ideas of honour, or their vile and empty turf battles, or the laughable idea of “respect” that supposedly “justifies” letting bullets fly—if anybody else dies, well hey, we didn’t mean to kill them.

Well, it doesn’t mean much, either, to those children that their father wasn’t meant to be killed. And apparently doesn’t mean enough, either, yet, for some people who were there to come forward and honour the dead man with a visit to the police station and a little information.

Canada has lost a decent human being; two children in a strange land have lost an honourable and self-sacrificing father. And some fragment of the hope and sanity that this country stands for in the minds of so many who are not its
citizens, but would one day like to be, has been icily chipped away, by mean people not worth the shadow of the life they ended.

In the swirl of “big” news, this isn’t a big story, but Hou Chang Mao’s life and death is a ferocious and sad parable whose meaning may outstay a hundred headlines. And his family deserves our respect and sympathy.