More Bethune
Tony Kondaks
Jeff White...
After reading it, ask yourself: why in God's name do we have a statue
honouring this madman on Guy Street in Montreal...
http://www.nationalpost.com/commentary.asp?f=990403/2440958.html
Bethune and the burden of guilt
The Canadian and Chinese governments made Norman Bethune a heroic figure,
but the doctor's heroes, Josef Stalin and Mao Tse-tung, had blood on their
hands
Jeff White
National Post
A meeting between Mao Tse-tung and Norman Bethune in an official painting
completed after the Cultural Revolution. Copies were everywhere.
In 1935, an obscure Montrealer visited a land of mass graves, ash-spewing
crematoria, and cattle cars carrying millions of terrified people to slavery
and death.
He was so impressed he decided to join the killers. That decision set him on
the road to becoming the most honoured Canadian of the century.
This is the story of Norman Bethune, who died exactly 60 years ago. The
killers he joined in 1935 were led by Josef Stalin and took at least 18
million lives (according to veteran anti-Stalinist historian Robert
Conquest), or perhaps a mere 12 million (New Left Review).
Nonetheless, Ottawa bureaucrats are so fond of Bethune that in 1990 they
spent $11-million in tax money on a film biography. Undeterred by the
public's rejection of their masterpiece, they've doled out another
$7-million to date to preserve his birthplace as a national shrine. Postage
stamps have appeared bearing his hard visage. A college and a high school
have been named for him.
Compare this unparalleled hero worship -- at least by officialdom -- with
the fate of Toronto graphic artist Ernst Zundel. The honours he's been
showered with include a nine-year court prosecution, a mail bomb, an attempt
to deport him, a postal ban, a ban from Parliament Hill, and visits to his
home by arsonists and masked marchers tossing paint bombs.
Not an ounce less opprobrium than he deserves, given his loathsome denial of
the horror seared into the memory of every Holocaust survivor in Canada. But
what opprobrium does Norman Bethune deserve? According to general consensus,
none. Current mythology would have us believe no one knew a thing about what
was really going on there. Not till Nikita Khrushchev's celebrated "secret
speech" of 1956, at any rate.
Not quite. Bethune couldn't have known that Stalin's victims were being
busily piled into a Moscow crematorium even as he attended conference
festivities nearby in 1935. He couldn't have known their ashes were drifting
down on to his jacket. But that there were victims -- that was common
knowledge.
Uncle Joe himself had actually announced one of his worst mass murders, "the
liquidation of the kulaks." Three million of these supposedly rich peasants,
and other prisoners, died at the campaign's height in 1929-31, according to
Soviet statistics published by a British MP in 1931.
The sainted Karl Marx had promised that wiping out the "anarchy of the
market" would set free "the springs of co-operative wealth." Such devout
Marxists as Stalin were dumbfounded when grain production followed price
incentives into oblivion, even after the kulaks had been well and truly
"liquidated." So they accused the survivors of hoarding grain and seized
every scrap they could find, right down to the oatmeal on the stove. Five to
eight million children, women, and men consequently starved to death, often
in sight of rotting mountains of their own seized grain.
This gargantuan crime was widely reported not long before Bethune's trip.
One published account originated with Ukrainian emigrant Marie Zuk, who, on
arrival in Winnipeg in September, 1933, told how starving neighbours had
been driven to kill and eat their own children.
Exhilarated by the realization that entire exploitative classes could be
swept away overnight, Bethune returned home to reject the company of such
democrats as the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation once and for all.
Their sin was "their non-realization of the absolute inevitability of the
use of force and force alone as the only true persuader" of "moneyed
people," he wrote a close friend (and wife of a CCF founder).
So Dr. Bethune threw his lot in with the recently legalized Canadian arm of
Stalin's party, joining a secret "Section 13" that later produced a host of
spies against Canada. In a Montreal speech, he mocked Canada's "timid
virgins," who blanched at mass murder. The persons who "would cry 'Stop
this! Do something! Police! Murder!' . . . lack the imagination to see
behind the blood the significance of [the] birth" of a new society, he said
contemptuously.
When the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, he added his efforts to the
pioneering blood-transfusion service the Republicans had started. Like his
Communist comrades in Spain, the good doctor considered the real enemy to be
anarchists and alleged followers of exiled Soviet hero Lev Trotsky. He
lashed out at "about a million of these anarchist bastards that we will have
to put up against the wall and shoot" -- as Russia's already had been. The
crime of the anarchists had been to inform Marx, in the 1870s, that any
Marxist ruler of Russia would "become worse than the Czar himself" within a
year.
By May, 1937, Spanish anarchists were paying with their lives for
successfully divining the plans of los authoritarios, as they called the
Marxists. But later that month the authoritarian Bethune regretfully had to
leave the scene of such bloody victories. His own co-workers demanded his
removal, fed up with his drunkenness, tantrums, arrogance, and
disappearances that lasted up to a month at a time. William Kashtan, a
Canadian Communist official who would secretly receive millions from the
Soviets in subsequent decades, crossed the Atlantic to investigate. Bethune
was ordered home after less than six months in Spain -- and long before the
war's end, 60 years ago this week.
On his return, he was cynically sold as a war hero and sent on a fundraising
tour. Bethune addressed 5,000 in Toronto -- two days after the world learned
Stalin had slaughtered Russia's top generals for supposed links to Adolf
Hitler and Trotsky. He addressed 9,000 in Montreal -- two days after his
comrades back in Spain had launched a purge of alleged Trotskyites. (At
least one was Canadian.) The good doctor wasn't disturbed by the bloodiest
moments of the Great Terror of 1937-38, Stalin's worst purge. But he was
upset that the NDP's predecessor was allegedly harbouring Trotskyites.
For the Terror didn't stop at the Soviet border. A key role was played by
foreign progressives, whose enthusiastic endorsement of the massacre of
alleged Trotskyites got heavy play in the Soviet media. Bethune's Communist
friends in Canada happily joined that chorus, claiming "their execution was
a richly deserved punishment."
One such soul was party official Tom Ewen. While seconded to Moscow, he
probably authored a memo demanding a crackdown on Canadian expatriates who
had managed to escape the Terror and return home to tell the tale. Some 500
to 1,000 of their comrades, mostly Finnish-Canadians and Finnish-Americans,
vanished into the Gulag.
Back in Canada, Ewen's daughter Jean crossed paths with the embittered
Bethune. He was conscious of having "blotted my copybook" in Spain. He had
earlier been fired from a prestigious Montreal job when his high-speed
surgery killed one too many patients. His marriage had failed -- even an
attempt to murder his ex-wife's lover had failed, according to historian
Roderick Stewart. Bethune turned his attention to war-torn China.
There, Marxist-Stalinist Mao Tse-tung was gaining fame for uttering pearls
of wisdom such as: "We must create a short reign of terror in all parts of
the countryside. A revolution is not like a dinner party." Thousands of
Chinese kulaks had already learned that the Maoist slogan, "Kill all the
rich peasants," was deadly serious.
Bethune decided that here was a cause worth crossing the world to join --
and die for. Sam Carr, a Canadian Communist official and spy, recruited Jean
Ewen to "look after" the party's darling by serving as his interpreter and
nurse. U.S. Communist party chief Earl Browder helped find American backing.
Coincidentally, the same month Bethune set sail for China, Browder happened
to send Moscow a request concerning one of his myriad espionage activities.
It went to Nikolai Yezhov, the feared secret police chief who executed the
entire Great Terror under Stalin's orders.
Bethune had to cross wartorn China to reach Mao's "Chinese Soviet Republic."
His journey was fuelled by the powerful Chinese liquor other doctors used as
an operating room hand-rinse. At his destination, he met Mao and was
delighted when the warlord noticed Bethune's cultivated resemblance to the
inventor of kulak killing, Vladimir Lenin. But at the first opportunity, Ms.
Ewen fled forever his "irascibility touched with arrogance."
He worked furiously on the flood of Communist casualties for the year and a
half of life left to him. In a 1998 book on Bethune, B.C. writer Larry
Hannant argues that at this last stage of his life he was able to transform
himself from the old "troubled, angry, aggressive, self-abusive" Bethune
into the "new man" of Marxist theology.
Beyond doubt, he had at last found a role for which his rapid-fire surgical
technique was suited. But his fate had been foreshadowed by his adventures
in Spain. There Bethune's passion for the front had prompted his assistant
Hazen Sise (later accused of spying for the Soviets) to judge him "a little
in love with death." In China, he preferred operating without gloves even
when he had them, resulting in a series of hand infections. In November,
1939, this practice brought him the Marxist martyrdom for which he longed.
But before Bethune died, the man he considered the "greatest living
statesman" -- his leader, Joseph Stalin -- reached a momentous alliance with
the anti-bourgeois, anti-Semitic soulmate he had helped to gain power in
Germany. Uncle Joe and Adolf Hitler agreed to divide Europe between them --
starting the Second World War.
Bethune couldn't have foreseen that his National Socialist allies would
observe and imitate the Soviet technique of shooting prisoners alongside
mass graves. He couldn't have dreamt that they would then go one better, by
exploiting a product of Germany's world-class chemicals industry, Zyklon B
poison gas.
But he could have foreseen what his hero Mao would do once he'd seized the
Forbidden City. The chairman trotted portraits of Stalin through the streets
as he imitated his hero's attempts to socialize agriculture and liquidate
kulaks and landlords. Maybe this time Marx's great experiment would work.
But history repeated itself. Mao only succeeded in executing millions and in
producing an enormous famine that, like Stalin's a quarter century earlier,
forced peasants to eat their children. It killed 27 million Chinese,
demographers say.
Finally, Mao's colleagues overruled him and ended the famine by buying
Canadian grain and permitting some market farming. In 1966, he
counter-attacked by purging them and millions of others. This vindictive
Cultural Revolution attracted defenders on campuses around the world, just
as had Stalin's purges. Students at a University of Toronto "teach-in"
cheered a Maoist defender of the purge and hooted down a British scholar who
tried to describe its atrocities.
Mao hadn't bothered to answer Bethune's letters while he was alive, but now
found him a useful icon of selflessness to direct against "capitalist
roaders." When word of Bethune's prominence in Chinese propaganda reached
Canada, Ottawa declared him a figure "of national historic significance" and
bought his birthplace. The prime minister was Pierre Trudeau, who had once
mocked the alleged Chinese "famine in which the conservative press of the
West takes such delight."
But such crimes were now officially non-events. Stalin had induced the
United Nations to drop his specialty, political massacres, from its
definition of genocide in 1948. That left only racial or religious killing,
and that was the narrow definition Trudeau adopted when he banned hate
propaganda promoting genocide in 1970. The Criminal Code now held that
massacring a race such as the Jews is far worse than massacring a class like
the kulaks. The principle gained the status of eternal law through frequent
repetition.
But Soviet Jew Vasily Grossman, as one of the first chroniclers of the
Holocaust and a witness to the Marxist genocide of the peasantry, had every
right to differ. "Just as the Germans proclaimed that Jews are not human
beings," he wrote, "thus did Lenin and Stalin proclaim kulaks are not human
beings."
An Ottawa historian reacted angrily when just that kind of comparison was
made recently. Michael Carley hadn't been impressed by newly published
Moscow files documenting spying by U.S. Marxists. He accused the files'
discoverers of a "necrophiliac grapple with the corpse of a dead [Cold War]
adversary." One of those necrophiliacs, U.S. historian Harvey Klehr, said
Dr. Carley's claim that the files didn't provide absolute proof "reminds us
of the Holocaust deniers who confidently assert that because there is no
signed order from Hitler ordering the extermination of the Jews, the
Holocaust itself didn't happen."
At least Norman Bethune was more honest than that.
ddown...@yahoo.com
<tkon...@primenet.com> wrote:
>The following excellent article is from the National Post, April 3, 1999 by
>Jeff White...
>
>After reading it, ask yourself: why in God's name do we have a statue
>honouring this madman on Guy Street in Montreal...
He was a Canadian who made it big outside of Canada. If Jack (or
Jacques?) the Ripper had been Canadian we would have a statue of him
somewhere or other too.
Claude Lacroix
>The following excellent article is from the National Post, April 3, 1999 by
>Jeff White...
>
>After reading it, ask yourself: why in God's name do we have a statue
>honouring this madman on Guy Street in Montreal...
>
>http://www.nationalpost.com/commentary.asp?f=990403/2440958.html
>
>Bethune and the burden of guilt
>The Canadian and Chinese governments made Norman Bethune a heroic figure,
>but the doctor's heroes, Josef Stalin and Mao Tse-tung, had blood on their
>hands
>
>Jeff White
>National Post
>
Des millions d'hommes et de femmes ont fait de Dieu leur héros ; Dieu a
détruit Sodome et Gomorre, provoquer le déluge, etc... Donc, tous les
déistes ont du sang sur leurs mains ?
Quand le brillant logicien condamnera-t-il Isaac Newton pour les millions
d'hommes et de femmes morts suite à l'application de la loi de la gravité ?
> A meeting between Mao Tse-tung and Norman Bethune in an official painting
>completed after the Cultural Revolution. Copies were everywhere.
Claude écrit :
Churchill et Roosevelt ont été photographiés avec Staline donc...
Coupables par association ?
Question : l'inventeur d'un outil (le marteau) est-il responsable de
l'utilisation que certains en feront (fracasser le crane de son voisin) ?
Tony Kondaks
Claude Lacroix wrote in message <8npO2.1834$Eb4....@weber.videotron.net>...
by
>>Jeff White...
>>
>>After reading it, ask yourself: why in God's name do we have a statue
>>honouring this madman on Guy Street in Montreal...
>>
>>http://www.nationalpost.com/commentary.asp?f=990403/2440958.html
>>
>>Bethune and the burden of guilt
>>The Canadian and Chinese governments made Norman Bethune a heroic figure,
>>but the doctor's heroes, Josef Stalin and Mao Tse-tung, had blood on their
>>hands
>>
>>Jeff White
>>National Post
>>
>
>Des millions d'hommes et de femmes ont fait de Dieu leur héros ; Dieu a
>détruit Sodome et Gomorre, provoquer le déluge, etc... Donc, tous les
>déistes ont du sang sur leurs mains ?
Yeah, if you're going to believe the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, you might
as well believe that they have blood on their hands.
>
>Quand le brillant logicien condamnera-t-il Isaac Newton pour les millions
>d'hommes et de femmes morts suite à l'application de la loi de la gravité ?
>
>> A meeting between Mao Tse-tung and Norman Bethune in an official painting
>>completed after the Cultural Revolution. Copies were everywhere.
>
>Claude écrit :
>
>Churchill et Roosevelt ont été photographiés avec Staline donc...
>Coupables par association ?
Churchill ad Roosevelt didn't support and encourage the mass-murders of
Stalin.
Bethune did.
>
>Question : l'inventeur d'un outil (le marteau) est-il responsable de
>l'utilisation que certains en feront (fracasser le crane de son voisin) ?
Of course not.
>
>
petes...@hotmail.com
> >Coupables par association ?
>
> Churchill ad Roosevelt didn't support and encourage the mass-murders of
> Stalin.
>
> Bethune did.
>
Faux, Bethune était certes naïf face au régime stalinien, mais il était un
internationaliste convaincu et qui aurait été très certainement opposé aux
purges staliniennes s'il avait eu le temps d'étudier plus sérieusement la
politique, surtout quand on sait que c'est la génération d'Octobre 1917 et ses
meilleurs dirigeants qui ont été massacrés par Staline et sa police secrète.
Quant à Churchill et Roosevelt, ils approuvaient dans les faits les purges car
eux savaient très bien qui assassinait qui exactement. Ils ont d'ailleurs tous
deux refusé l'asile politique à la seule personnalité soviétique qui ait pu
échapper un tant soit peu à la boucherie stalinienne du fait de son immense
notoriété internationale : Léon Trotsky. En revanche, le magazine Life
proposait Staline comme homme de l'année... La presse bourgeoise en Europe
saluait également de façon cynique les purges en félicitant Staline de massacrer
pratiquement tous les cadres du parti et tous les officiers de l'Armée Rouge
ayant participé aux événements de 1917 et en s'amusant même à dresser des listes
de noms des leaders bolcheviks qui restaient à tuer... Enfin, le FBI de l'époque
de Roosevelt a collaboré avec le GPU de Staline par l'entremise de Joseph Hansen
dans l'assassinat de Léon Trotsky au Mexique en 1940... Par la suite, Roosevelt
est même allé jusqu'à interdire que le corps de Trotsky soit enterré aux
États-Unis, comme l'avait demandé la section américaine de la Quatrième
Internationale à cette époque, le Socialist Workers Party. Il semble bien que
la droite soit en tous cas coupable de partager les mêmes intérêts que Staline à
l'époque où le docteur Bethune luttait seul contre le fascisme... Tiens,
parlant de fascisme, Mussolini avait même déclaré qu'il admirait Staline, car il
était le seul homme au monde a avoir tué plus de communistes que lui. C'était
d'ailleurs l'époque où il se demandait s'il n'allait pas s'allier à la France
et à La Grande-Bretagne de Chamberlain (prédécesseur de Churchill, mais enfin,
c'est quand même la même clique) contre Hitler qui reluquait du côté du tyrol
italien de langue allemande...
Bref, le monde est bien petit entre Mussolini, Staline, Churchill, Chamberlain,
Roosevelt, Hitler et cie. De l'autre côté, il y avait des milliers de
Bethune. Une statue pour s'en rappeler vaut bien les milliers de statue de
porcs qui polluent le paysage, nos valeurs et nos mémoires... et quelques lignes
pour le rappeller aux ignares valent bien cinq minutes de mon temps...
>
>