Richler didn't abide pandering to bigotry

We honour Mordecai Richler mainly as a novelist, and rightly so, but when his admirers celebrate his career with a memorial tribute in Montreal on Thursday, they shouldn't forget to praise him also as a friend of liberty and a vital figure in our politics. This role probably surprised him as much as it annoyed his adversaries, but it was the greatest performance of his journalistic career.

History often demonstrates that merciless ridicule can contribute more to civilization than well-bred tolerance. Unfortunately, most of our politicians and journalists ignore this truth. Instead they try desperately hard to look gently on every crackpot idea that arises among us, providing that those who preach it claim to be victims, or representatives of victims.

When some Toronto blacks urged that a revival of Show Boat be cancelled because they expected to find it offensive, no one laughed. Instead, people put on their most solemn faces and pretended that a grave issue had been raised. When another group of blacks and their supporters picketed a Royal Ontario Museum exhibition of African sculpture, claiming falsely that it was racist, the Ontario government forced the museum to treat the protesters with the utmost seriousness. Ten years ago, when several people (never named) insisted that June Callwood was a racist, The Toronto Star published this foolish libel and discussed the secret authors with dignity and gravity. When union bosses at CUPE (jumping late on a misdirected European bandwagon) equate Israel with apartheid-era South Africa, hardly anyone points out that they're making jackasses of themselves. When Canadian Muslims appear on the CBC to announce that jihad does not mean "holy war" and Islam is an entirely peaceful religion, program hosts nod solemnly and thank them for their contribution.

And then there was the matter of the Quebec separatist government making it illegal to post a sign saying "Eat at Joe's." Nobody laughed, except Richler -- and he laughed so long and so hard that in the end he put a crucial question ("Are they out of their minds?") on the agenda of Quebec and Canada, where it remains to this day.

At the beginning the language laws were like a bad dream from which we expected to awaken. In some muddled corner of our minds we imagined they were purely symbolic, not meant to be taken literally, and likely soon to disappear. In fact, the Parti Québécois was altogether serious. Not long after winning power in 1976 (with 41% of the votes), they set about reshaping the nature of Quebec society. A leading cabinet minister, Dr. Camille Laurin (the psychiatrist who dyed his hair, as Richler liked to point out) issued a policy paper summarizing his government's intentions in 11 words: "There will no longer be any question of a bilingual Quebec." This meant, among many other things, that by law Eaton's had to change its name to Eaton, which Eaton's obediently did.

Not since the suppression of native religion in British Columbia, early in the 20th century, had a government in Canada so offensively invaded a culture. How were citizens of a modern pluralist democracy to react? Politicians had to pretend they respected the separatists, no matter how stupid their law, but journalists and academics had no equivalent excuse.

Yet writers across the country treated the Quebec laws as an interesting initiative, perhaps justified when you considered the oppression under which French Canada lived. Had Ontario or B.C. tried to tell a minority of citizens how to use their native languages, civil libertarians would have risen up in fury. But we applied a different standard to Quebec.

We tolerated what we deplored, out of nervous condescension. And our acceptance of the unthinkable (yes, mea culpa) helped make the abnormal look normal. In Quebec, many English speakers (led by their accommodating journalists) became willing victims. Anyone describing the laws as totalitarian was considered eccentric.

Richler was the most important and influential of the few who had the courage to depict Dr. Laurin and his colleagues as the clowns they were. When Richler finally realized these people meant what they said, he began producing a series of devastating articles and public statements. This project, along with material he uncovered on the rich vein of anti-Semitism in the history of Quebec institutions such as Le Devoir, culminated in a long New Yorker article in 1991 and his book, Oh Canada! Oh Quebec!

He enraged the separatists and other nationalists, and embarrassed some of his best friends. (Peter Gzowski, for instance, found Richler's views painful.) But Richler, more than anyone else in Canadian history, showed how satire could be a deadly weapon against bigoted politicians and officious bureaucrats. He left a shining example for journalists of the future to study and emulate.

Quebec nationalists of course considered him their enemy. They hated him for recalling the ugliest moments of their history, and hated him even more for ridiculing them outside Canada. In all this they were dead wrong. By listening, and reacting honestly, Richler did them far more honour than those pious hypocrites who pretended that government control of language was logical and defensible. By discussing the Quebec laws in the U.S., he brought an international perspective to an issue that was mired in provincialism. Above all, Richler appealed to intelligence rather than pandering to bigotry. It wasn't his fault that the separatists and their friends missed the point.