This is Disgusting!

Last week, this country lost one of its great writers - Pierre Berton. I've only read a handful of his writing - it's good writing, but my personal interests aren't in "recent history".

However, I made the mistake of reading Ted Byfield's column this morning:

Berton's beliefs contradicted his books

At first, I couldn't decide if I should be shocked by what Mr. Byfield had written, or if it was intended to just make me downright furious.

Mr. Byfield writes:

He stood for almost all the hallowed left-wing causes -- the welfare state, medical services under total government control, gay rights, state day care, easy access to abortion, lavish old-age pensions, and taxes as high as they had to be to pay for all this.

We get nothing on the first female MP, the socialist Agnes Macphail, nothing on Angus and Grace MacInnes, while his only article on the sainted Tommy Douglas consisted of a brief reference to Douglas' "heroism" when the man died.

Even the socialist movement as a whole gets no book at all.

So you have to wonder: If Berton was such a thorough-going socialist, why is it that he found no socialist in the entire history of the country worth writing a book about.

Augh! What is it with commentators these days - in particular, right wing commentators? A man dies, and these clowns choose to use his passage from this world as an excuse to get up on their soap boxes and claim their particular viewpoint's "moral and ethical superiority". Good God! A family is grieving the loss of a father and grandfather; a country is mourning the loss of one of its great minds and historians, and these clowns have to criticize his politics????

I'm starting to conclude that the loudest, most obdurate, of right-wing commentators like Mr. Byfield have lost the very moral compass that they claim the "left wing" of lacking. (Oh wait - no the left wing are "moral relativists" according to the likes of Byfield) At least when President Reagan passed away recently, I didn't see left-wing commentators getting on a soapbox and bleating about his politics - no matter how much they disagreed with him.

In his conclusion, Byfield writes:

Berton's reason for not writing about the socialists was he found them so dull and boring nobody would buy books about them.

That is, in the socialist ideal, none must be allowed to tower above the rest, as Berton himself assuredly towered above the rest of us writers.

Perhaps, too, he finally saw that a country without buccaneers and pirates would be likewise dull and boring, offering nothing whatever for a Pierre Berton to make into the fascinating history he has produced.

Beyond the snide, sneering commentary of this moron's writing lies reality. If people like Mr. Byfield held "power", women would not have voting rights in this land; ethnic minorities would be second-class citizens; Native people would still not have voting rights; we would still have homosexuality illegal; freedom of religion would only apply if you happened to belong to their particular brand of christianity; schools would still be using the strap to punish students; Chinese and other immigrants would be the labour forces in our mines and forests doing all of the dangerous work (remember how many Chinese immigrants died building the CPR, Mr. Byfield?).

The buccaneers and pirates that "did such wonderful things", often did so at a horrific, Machievellian, price. I admire their accomplishments, but I also admire the accomplishments of Nellie McClung; Pierre Elliot Trudeau (who did more for equality in our society than any thousand so-called "Conservatives" have done); Tommy Douglas and many others whose accomplishments the "right-wing" of today would have us ignore.