Communist physician Norman Bethune, left, and a comrade from the Red Chinese Army speak with Canadian Treasury Board President Tony Clement, right, in a vignette as imagined by Sun News Network. Below: Dr. Bethune, looking weirdly contemporary with a fashionable goatee; far-right ideologue Rob Anders; the real Mr. Clement.
Is the bizarre brouhaha over who stood up for the Chinese national anthem and what its words are evidence of a serious ideological split within Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s ruling Conservative Party of Canada?
If you think stuff like that only matters in places like Communist China and North Korea, maybe you should think again!
Apparently public signs of an ideological spat can signal trouble among party cadres, not to mention the apparatchiks who support various party ideological factions, in pretty well any old secretive and authoritarian regime.
That said, it may require the services of a skilled “Kremlinologist” to get to the bottom of the battle within Mr. Harper’s CPC that began on July 11 when Treasury Board President Tony Clement attended a ceremony in his Ontario riding marking the reopening of a spruced-up museum honouring a Communist saint all but forgotten anywhere but China.
It does seem as if the fight between people associated with ultra-right-wing Calgary West MP Rob Anders and ideological moderates like Mr. Clement and Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird over tax money spent on the museum may be a sign of deepening fissures within the CPC.
Alas, the mainstream media has paid scant attention to this seemingly silly affair, and that only to dismiss it as an insignificant and mildly amusing tempest in a teapot, not as the important indicator of internal struggle it may be.
Only Sun News Network, Mr. Harper’s semi-official state media, seems to be taking the storm with the kind of humourless gravity it deserves – leastways, if you happen to view neoconservative ideology as seriously as do the gang of four or so MPs closest to our Dear Leader, Mr. Harper. This group includes Mr. Anders.
Charles Adler, a Sun News commentator associated with the extreme neoconservative element within the Harper CPC, seems to have been the first to attack Mr. Clement, Member of Parliament for the well outfitted and brightly painted Parry Sound Muskoka riding. (No starvation among the peasants there, thank you very much!)
On July 12, Mr. Adler took issue with Mr. Clement’s role in the decision by the Harper government to spend $2.5 million upgrading the former home of Norman Bethune, the Communist Canadian physician who became a hero to millions of Chinese for fighting alongside Mao Zedong in the late 1930s. The “shrine,” as Sun Media keeps calling the well-appointed little museum on the site of Dr. Bethune’s former home, just happens to be in the general vicinity of the riding’s famous gazebo, sparkling public washrooms and glass-smooth sidewalks built for the G20 conference in faraway Toronto back in June 2010.
Now, it seems most likely given his record that the moderate Mr. Clement wasn’t thinking about ideology at all when he championed sprucing up the museum, which is said to be extremely popular with visitors from China. More likely he had in mind the ice-cream cones his constituents could sell to Chinese tourists and his well-known penchant for letting no local gazebo go unimproved if Ottawa is paying.
Nevertheless, Dr. Bethune’s Communist history provided the opportunity for party ideologues seem to have been waiting for to snipe at moderates identified as supporting the project.
Having pretty w
ell eliminated the old “Red Tories” from the CPC after its takeover by the far-right Reform Party during what’s now known as the Invasion of the Party Snatchers in 2003, this may indicate the radicals now see an opportunity to purge the party of its moderates as well.
Dr. Bethune, who by all accounts wasn’t a very nice person at all, succumbed to his own sloppy surgical techniques in China in 1939 and soon after was raised to the status of official saint by that country’s ideologues.
Rather like the War of 1812 with the Americans, the Communist Dr. Bethune seems at first glance like an odd choice for a pro-American market-fundamentalist party like Mr. Harper’s. But that is before we remember that the prime minister’s commercial backers would very much like to see doors opened to more business with Mainland China. (The phrase “Mainland China,” by the way, is an ideologically freighted way of saying you understand the capitalist island of Taiwan is not part of Communist China, even though both Taiwan’s leaders and those of the mainland insist it is. Well, whatever…)
As Mr. Adler’s shouts subsided, Mr. Anders himself, one of the PM’s gang of four, appeared on the semi-official state broadcaster to condemn the project – although he was more circumspect about attacking Mr. Clement by name, leaving that task to his well-trained ideological attack dogs.
Speaking of whom, the fray was next joined by Ezra Levant, another Sun News bloviator with impeccable CPC ideological credentials and close personal connections to both Mr. Anders and the prime minister. On Bastille Day, Mr. Levant eviscerated Mr. Clement anew in one of his trademark TV tirades.
The sharply observant Mr. Levant, who can spot an ideologically suspect lapel pin at 40 yards, apparently noticed Mr. Clement smiling and nodding in time with the Chinese national anthem in a video clip of the opening of the renovated museum.
Mr. Levant owns the real scoop in this affair, because it was he who looked up the words to the Chinese anthem – presumably on Wikipedia, the principal source for Sun News’s crack research team. “It’s a war song,” he huffed. “Here’s what Clement was smiling along to…” And, indeed, as he observed, so goes the March of the Volunteers: “Brave the enemy’s fire, March on! March on! …”
Sun News was all over the Communist song’s lyrics, and the fact Mr. Clement stood up for it, like an angry bull to a red flag – no doubt holding in reserve for the moment the certain knowledge Opposition Leader Thomas Mulcair, notoriously the holder of a French passport, has stood for that country’s anthem, La Marseillaise, which goes, “…Formez vos bataillons, Marchons! Marchons!…”
Another Sun News yammering head, Brian Lilley, also piled into the affray, but, frankly, there’s only so much of this stuff one can watch without requiring sedation.
While the full meaning of this dispute is not yet clear, it is evident the tag-team attacks on Mr. Clement by the PM’s tame commentators, and the defences mounted by other party moderates like Mr. Baird, not to mention defences by the Globe and Mail and elements within the Prime Minister’s Office, signal a widening of the rift between the CPC’s most radical cadres and its moderates.
Meanwhile, in the prime minister’s home city, another ideological battle erupted over the words of a different national anthem.
This time it was the bilingual Canadian national song, O Canada, a version of which sung at the Calgary Stampede included only the English words.
Perhaps the Stampede’s organizers were concerned the French version would needlessly arouse passions among the PM’s Protestant fellow believers with its Catholic-sounding war cry of “As is thy arm ready to wield the sword/ So also is it ready to carry the cross/ Thy history is an epic/ Of the most brilliant exploits/ Thy valour steeped in faith!”
Then again, maybe it was just that no one in Cowtown speaks French. Except for Mr. Mulcair, of course, and he was wisely only passing through.
This post also appears on Rabble.ca.
The Reform far right is warring with the Reform ultra far right? Hilarious. Even more hilarious is the Rob Anders photo, which could have come from a eugenics textbook with the caption ‘imbecile’.
Good job David for exposing the Reform Demagogues for who they really are, and their slick shameless pandering to the Wealthy Chinese immigrants their party is individually choosing for citizenship based on their Chinese BANK Accounts. It is no secret that the Reform Alliance election robbers who are posing as Conservatives by masquerading behind the Conservative moniker, are shamelessly pandering to the boat loads of wealthy Chinese immigrants they are flooding Vancouver with. But, honestly this is the lowest I have ever seen a Harper bogus Conservative ever stoop to, in order to pander to a targeted immigrant voter demographic. Harper knows that almost all Chinese immigrants subscribe to the Conservative mantra, because they come from a place of such oppression by the communists, and above all worship business ideology. It is truly sad that the Chinese immigrants cannot see what the Canadian Emperor is hiding beneath his cloak, and that they are merely a pawn in the Harper master plan. I do find it amusing how the Conservative Party faithful flip-flop on supporting their great leader, to me this is an obvious sign of severe fractures in the major factions that make up the fake Conservative Party of Canada. The right wing CPC extremists simply cannot see the potential Asian voter value these shill shenanigans their CPC party compatriots employ to target support from an identifiable minority group such as the Wealthy Chinese. Well the Chinese did sweat toil, and die to build Canada a railroad, now we need the poor Chinese to be shipped in large quantities to toil and build the great Sinopec Tar Sands projects. Perhaps Stephen the Shill is not so dumb after all. I cannot help but ponder the value of the CPC flooding Canada with 1 Million Chinese workers to win the next Federal election. HarperNomics are killing Canada in my opinion.
can you please clarify more on why Bethune wasn’t a very nice person at all.
From Christopher Majka article on rabble, it looks to me quite opposite.
A reader asks about my rather flip observation that Dr. Bethune wasn’t a very nice person. Well, as the not particularly sympathetic biographers Roderick and Sharon Stewart put it, his convictions did not prevent a history of bullying colleagues and his wife, and a history of alcoholism. The left seemed to react as badly to him then as the right does now – he was removed from his post in Spain during that country’s civil war by the Canadian political party that used to be known by the initials CPC (not the Conservatives) for heavy drinking, womanizing and misuse of donations for such purposes as buying himself monogrammed shirts in Paris. The biographers quote a missionary doctor saying of him: “The Angel Gabriel couldn’t get along with Norman Bethune. He’s a horrible man” The reference to sloppy surgical practices, by the way, is because Bethune died when his finger became infected during a characteristically swift operation in which he used no gloves, after which he carried on operating on other patients even though he knew his hand was infected. The Stewarts argue no one dared to stop him and save his life by amputating the hand.
I’m sure Sun News checked Concervapedia first — it’s a real thing, here http://www.conservapedia.com/Main_Page — only to discover that the super awesome sounding alternative to the socialist Wikipedia mega-mind collective only has resources if you hate atheists, gays, or gay atheists. Don’t get them started on Darwin.
Not surprisingly, like the French Revolution who chopped the heads off statues when they realized all the slow nobility had already lost their coconuts, the ideologues in the CPC can’t help but eat next election’s seed grain. Mr Harper has his work cut out for him.
Thank you for this wonderful link, Alex. If it hadn’t been for the Conservapedia, I wouldn’t have known that Fidel Castro has been replaced by a much shorter Fake Fidel! The entry on the topic didn’t say, but I expect Fake Fidel was brought to Havana in a black helicopter with United Nations markings that didn’t file a flight path from Denver International Airport. So mote it be!
It’s not hard to see why this Bethune charcater has them up in arms. If free market fundamentalism is a religion then Bethune is one of worst demons yet to emerge from the pits of hell.
And he was born right here in Canada. Cool, eh.
But rather than focus their negative energies on Bethune, the Gang of Four should work on promting their own icon. I have the perfect candidate: Anne of Green Gables.
Have a campaign to put Anne of Green on the loonie, maybe on the the coat of arms or on gov’t letterhead. Or even have her on an alternative flag for special occasions.
She should be plastered on airport walls everyhere right underneath the words “Welcome to Canada.
Why Anne? In the first place she’s a big hit in Japan. She’s as popular there as Bethune is in China.
Secondly, the Chinese and Japanese hate each other all that much, (going back to WWII when Japan invaded mainland China). So when a Chinese visitor steps off a plane, the first thing they’ll see is Anne.
Sort of a subtle dig at our new Chinese masters.
You have an excellent point there, Ron. What’s more, on the plus side from the neo-Con perspective, Ann was the beneficiary of a successful private adoption arranged through a family and possibly a religious connection. On the downside from the way they view the world, however, surely Ann was a proto-feminist if ever there was a proto-feminist! Perhaps that makes her someone we can all agree about. Viva Ann por siempre!
A few additional points about Dr. Bethuren’s life may put all this into a more balanced historical perspective. Bethune was a medical student in the First World War; one of his classmates was Frederick Banting (he of Insulin fame) [source: Gov’t of Canada website http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/physicians/030002-2100-e.html. He pioneered several techniques in thoracic surgery, some of which are still in use today. Shortly before the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, in which an elected government (with Communist members) was eventually overthrown by a fascist dictatorship supported by both Mussolini and Hitler, he went to Spain to join the forces supporting the legitimate government. While in Spain, he pioneered the creation of field hospital blood banks to treat the wounded. He later returned to Canada and toured the country, attempting to raise funds for the Republican cause in Spain.
His relocation to China in 1938 was in response to the recent invasion of China by Japan, an event which brought Mao’s Communists and Chiang’s Nationalists together in a kind of unity against the greater enemy. He died in November, 1939, 2 months after the outbreak of WW II in Europe, and 10 years before Mao’s ultimate victory in the Chinese Civil War.
…oops, tangled finger typo: Dr. Bethune.
Dr Bethune was a great and flawed Canadian. He despised capitalism. No other Canadian surgeon I know of worked with the Chinese army in the battlefield with few surgical supplies. There was no way to sterilise operating gloves which were often nonexistent as were dressings. His surgical skills were never in question by his peers who hated his politics He saved lives operating with his bare hands and sought no reward from anyone.The missionary who criticised him for being sloppy cannot be taken seriously
Humourous article and great follow up comments – I did my best to reflect my understanding of the man… but it’s not the only thing I do in China..
Please enjoy, hate, but certainly comment on http://www.SpiritOfBethune.com
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