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«« Normand Lester
Normand Lester's book cover shows maple leaf dripping in blood.
It's getting hard to follow our premier in his incoherent ramblings. As was Lucien Bouchard before him, he is capable of contradicting himself from one day to the next.
On Monday, he assured an English-speaking, federalist audience in Toronto that his Quebec sovereignism is "not motivated for one fraction of a second by any resentment about our friends in the rest of Canada."
This was one day after he had, for the second time in eight days, recommended a work of anti-English hate literature to a French-speaking, sovereignist audience in Quebec.
Our book critic to the nation advised his audience to read Normand Lester's newly published history of the "crimes" of English Canadians, mostly against French Canadians, "so that such things never happen again and so that we understand each other better between peoples."
The book, Le Livre Noir du Canada Anglais (The Black Book of English Canada), is currently available in the original French only. So it's safe to assume whatever "understanding" it creates will be mainly among francophones. And to say that Lester's book is likely to inspire "resentment about our friends in the rest of Canada" on the part of a francophone reader is putting it mildly.
It's not necessarily hate literature just because Lester retells some unpleasant but undeniable historic truths about the actions of the English in Canada toward francophones and other ethnic groups.
Rather, what does make it hate literature is its sweeping, negative generalizations about the members of a particular group and its expression and incitement of hatred toward them.
Lester's extended rant is very much about the present as well as the past. To Lester, all the English in Canada, today as yesterday, are presumed guilty of crimes of opinion as well as of deed against the French unless proven innocent. A single magazine column is deemed sufficient proof that since the 1995 referendum, all of English Canada is at war with Quebec, "dreams of a new battle of the Plains of Abraham, dreams of finishing with Quebec."
Lester ignores any evidence in the defence of the accused, and if his research has not turned up any statements proving their guilty intent, then he simply condemns them on the additional charge of hypocrisy. In Judge Lester's kangaroo court, the English cannot win.
On the rare occasions the English do the right thing, it's only because it happens to coincide with their interests. The French, however, always do the right thing, because they are good and generous and generally, morally superior in every way to the English.
The English are suspicious of the French because they are "paranoid"; the French are suspicious of the English because they really are out to get them, just as they've always been. When the French have minority status in Canada, it's "oppression" by the English; when the English have it in Quebec, it's "democratic majority rule" by the French.
Here's an example of the "better understanding" of English Canadians, as Landry put it, that Lester's book will give francophones:
The current opposition to forced municipal mergers (remember, this is supposed to be a history book) on the part of anglophones in the Montreal suburbs is not about taxes or services or local identity. Rather, it's merely "the most recent manifestation" of the mentality of "a large majority of English Quebecers," who have always refused to live "in a democratic state where the French would be in a majority." Of course, that must be why they live in Quebec.
With unconscious irony, Lester writes that "it is a characteristic of racist discourse to demonize the group being abused while giving oneself all virtues, to claim to represent universal values while the target group for the hateful remarks is decried as mean-spirited and its demands as worthless, anti-democratic and intolerant."
That comes pretty close to describing the book that our premier now has twice endorsed.
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Last Saturday, I wrote that the Société St. Jean-Baptiste de Montréal had honoured Lester for his book. In a letter to the editor published yesterday, society president Guy Bouthillier said the honour was not for the book.
Gee, I must have misunderstood the significance of the use of the cover of the book to illustrate the announcement of the honour that, as of yesterday, was still on the society's Web site (www.ssjb.com, click on "actualité" at the top of the home page and then, on the "actualité" page, scroll down to the item headed "Prix Olivar-Asselin").
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