FAKE NEWS CANADIAN STYLE
By Robin Mathews, July 2020
When the fake news
producing Mainstream Press and Media in Canada want, really, to massage
Canadian brains, they (often) choose, it seems, a U.S. person working in Canada
the one here at McGill University in Montreal.
The U.S. writer,
David Shribman, [
JUST WATCH THEM] is given
a page of the Globe and Mail [June 20, 2020, p.03] to compare someone (I would
say) he obviously knows very little about
“Pierre Elliott Trudeau, with someone he might know a little about” U.S. president
Donald Trump.
He finds in Trudeau
someone who acted against an apprehended insurrection showing elegance and
proper behaviour while president Trump, threatening to use the U.S Insurrection
Act, reveals the very opposite.
David Shribman apparently doesn’t know that during Trudeau’s
time at Harvard University (1944-45), more than twenty years before he became
Canada’s prime minister and invoked
The War Measures Act, Pierre Trudeau wrote
an essay in which he foreshadowed his later action.
The Nemnis point out that in his long and serious essay sympathetic to political violence Trudeau sets out (p.33) three criteria. The
method shall be chosen that is best apportioned to the desired end. Secondly: The method shall be applied
implacably. And thirdly: That method
shall be subject to perfect control.
Trudeau writes: 'the best trick of all is to succeed in licking the
opponent at his own game: for cheating is not wicked when the game is to cheat.'
And (p. 34) 'If an action has been
singled out as the most appropriate one in the circumstances, it is sheer
stupidity to begin belly-aching over its illegality.'
That proposition conveniently invalidates any obligation on
the part of the State that might be imposed by adhering to The Rule of
Law.[When a
top RCMP officer in Quebec, John Starnes, insisted to a radio
Canada journalist that all the illegal acts of the RCMP in the
October Crisis
were ordered from very high up
we may
see his remark as historic, especially since the RCMP was taking the brunt of
the censure for having frequently acted outside the law during the period.]
The Globe and Mail writer doesn’t mention that Trudeau was
looking into
The War Measures Act months before he employed it.
Strangely though, David Shribman reports
John English “former Liberal MP and pretty well recognized as a Liberal Scribe“ as
having written an authoritative biography
without mentioning the absolutely key work by
Max and Monique Nemni close friends of Trudeau, with complete access to his
papers
and determined to tell the truth
as nearly as they were able to do.
We might be quite certain that the ragtag members of the
FLQ
were not about to undertake an insurrection and so Trudeau told
Irwin Cotler(ex-Liberal MP) that, in effect, one can apprehend an insurrection though an
insurrection is not likely. (Shribman, incidentally, only quotes Liberals for
any serious comments on Trudeau’s activities.)
Of course, one can apprehend anything one wants and Trudeau did
(pressuring Quebec authorities to arrive at the same apprehension in order to
make possible the use of a military and any other available hammer to flatten
what was (at core) a legitimate push for Quebec independence.
David Shribman, I would say, serves the machinery of Fake
News admirably even attractively almost as if he knows what he is writing
about.
But the matter goes very, very much deeper than David
Shribman has the ghost of an idea of perceiving. Madam Laporte attributed her
husband’s murder to the Canadian State not to unidentified members of the FLQ.
One of the doctors assigned to Laporte’s autopsy refused to sign the Report
submitted. And James Cross, British Trade Commissioner (not as Shribman reports
a British diplomat), may have been kidnapped by the Canadian State. If he was not, the RCMP very quickly removed
the occupants of the apartment adjoining the one in which Cross was held, (did
not release him) and watched and bugged all the activities connected to that
address for the whole term of the long so-called kidnap of Cross during which time, of course, the police
forces of Canada (Canadians were told) were vainly searching for Cross and his
kidnappers!
But facts don’t matter a lot in the Shribman article, I
would suggest. The article JUST WATCH THEM isn’t (apparently) about fact or
history. It is, in my opinion, a fake news essay in which a fake reading of
Canadian History is used by a U.S. writer in Canada to write about unappealing
contemporary events in the USA (making P.E. Trudeau look good so that Donald
Trump can be made to look bad.) AND, in the process, the writer [remember this,
in my judgement, is fake news] idealizes a person and his actions which honest
assessment would probably find underhanded, divisive, evilly manipulative, dishonest and even murderous to such an extent that
Donald Trump’s actions in comparison might look say like exercises in boyish vanity.
Maybe assessing and assessment is what Fake News is all
about. Fake news is in its way a kind of
political violence and as Pierre Trudeau wrote the method shall be chosen that
is best apportioned to the desired end.
