In 1920, ten leaders of the Winnipeg general strike of 1919 were tried in a Manitoba court for conspiracy and sedition. The press maintained that Winnipeg was menaced by mobs incited by foreign agitators, many of them Bolsheviks. Six of the men on trial were born in England, two in Scotland and two in Canada. Among them was J.S. Woodsworth, a former Methodist minister and the first leader of the CCF. There was also another former Methodist minister, and a member of the Manitoba Legislature. Two were aldermen. The Toronto Mail and Empire wrote “that no foreign rabble will be allowed to set aside the public authorities and defy the laws of this country.”
Had it not been for the post 9/11 anti-terrorist mass hysteria comparable to the anti-Bolshevism hysteria after WWI, Omar Khadr would have been quickly dealt with. He would not have been kept in Guantanamo Bay detention camp for ten years. Canada would not have been reluctant to have him back to face Canadian justice.
Ninety years from now people will shake their heads in disbelief about us.
This time, however, The Globe and Mail wrote in an editorial (October 1): “Some day, perhaps, Mr. Khadr will be seen as an exemplar of a mad moment in world history.”
Would it be reasonable to propose that only sentient entities endowed
with capacity for ‘telos’ can create ‘a mad moment in world history’?
To the philosopher who raised this question the answer is no.
I’m not sure how long I had to live before I became aware/certain that leaders will always continue to use fear to get their way.
And, from Eric Hobsbawm (“historians, whose business it is to remember what others forget”): The destruction of the past, or rather of the social mechanisms that link one’s comtemporary experience to that of earlier generations, is one of the most characteristic and eerie phenomena of the late 20th century. Most young men and women at the century’s end grow up in a sort of permanent present lacking any organic relation to the public past of the times they live in. This makes historians, whose business it is to remember what others forget, more essential at the end of the second millennium than ever before. But for that very reason they must be more than simply chroniclers, remembrancers and compilers, though this is also the historians’ necessary function. In 1989 all governments and especially all foreign ministers in the world would have benefited from a seminar on the peace settlements after the two world wars, which most of them had apparently forgotten.