FLQ Manifesto part of the past

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 11/09/2009 (5875 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Decent people should be offended by the fact that a national agency will permit the reading of a terrorist manifesto next weekend at the Plains of Abraham in Quebec City as part of a series of readings to commemorate the 1759 battle that altered the course of Canadian history.

The manifesto in question was issued in October 1970 by the Front de Liberation du Quebec following the kidnapping of British diplomat James Cross and Quebec cabinet minister Pierre Laporte, who was subsequently murdered. The FLQ was responsible for more than 200 bombings in Quebec during the 1960s, causing the deaths of at least five people. It was all done in the name of creating an independent Marxist Quebec.

The National Battlefields Commission, the same group that cancelled plans for a major re-enactment of the battle because of fears of a violent backlash, a decision for which it should be ashamed, has said it will allow the reading of the FLQ Manifesto, but was quick to point out that it does not endorse the document. That kind of courage is admirable, although it’s unfortunate it was not in evidence when the commission backed down from plans for the historical re-enactment.

Decent people should be offended that the manifesto will get a public airing at the commemorative event — Montreal singer and sovereigntist Luck Mervil has even been asked to perform the reading — but it would be a violation of Canadian values to ban it from the stage.

Like the Battle of 1759, which some sovereigntists regard as the worst event in Quebec’s past, the FLQ Manifesto is also part of the province’s and Canada’s history. We may not like that part of our history, but it is there nonetheless. Banning the speech would also be an unwarranted violation of the principles of freedom of speech and freedom of assembly. Democratic values and principles have no meaning if they are ignored when they are inconvenient or even offensive.

If the manifesto has any value, it’s that it sheds light on the kind of kooks who resort to violence to achieve political goals. The members of the FLQ, judging by the manifesto, were muddled in their thinking and heavily influenced by the extreme left-wing revolutionary ideology that was popular among students and some workers at that time.

“We live in a society of terrorized slaves, terrorized by the big bosses…. (and) the Roman Capitalist Church,” it says in one typically sophomoric and childish rant. It is tedious, poorly written and stuffed with paranoid delusions. But then no one ever said history was made up only of heroes, saints and literary giants.