Noticing. Noticing Norman Bethune

In Canada we’re always getting hurt. We’re always noticing. There’s softwood lumber, wheat, takeovers of our resources and industries, U.S. ships using our waters and refusing to say if they are nuclear-armed, a U.S. ambassador who berates us as if we are retarded animals, and on, and on, and on. So when someone in the world tries a lie (like the need to invade Iraq to prevent an imminent nuclear war) Canadians notice, Canadians are suspicious, Canadians don’t believe. Canadians don’t jump in as U.S. people overwhelmingly jump in.

There are things, however, that many Canadians don’t notice. One of those things is around us all the time. Almost every institution in the country tells us not to notice it. Some of the institutions are confused, some even innocent.

What do their spokespeople tell us? They tell us, for instance - as an MLA from Alberta did over radio this morning (on the day I am writing this column) - that private enterprise can deliver auto insurance [think also life insurance and home insurance, etc.] better than a public system can. But we know the three or four provinces that have public auto insurance are better served than the ones that have private systems. The facts scream at us. They are right there to look at. In privately insured Ontario, Dalton McGuinty became premier of the Province, and fifteen minutes later froze (private) auto insurance rates – a great sign of confidence in Ontario’s private system. Even Alberta, which prides itself on a wonderful private enterprise system, has one of the most costly auto insurance systems in the country. Private enterprise – the evidence shows – cannot deliver auto insurance better than a public system can.

We should remind ourselves – we should notice – that the private auto insurers are making bundles of profit from people’s distress, anguish, economic loss, physical pain and suffering. And they want to make more by cutting pay-outs.

Auto insurance is the tip of an iceberg – something we all can see and I can point to. Beneath the surface things are often the same: public enterprise can do a better job than private enterprise can. Public enterprise strives to give service and equal treatment. Private enterprise strives to increase profit and to satisfy private greed. Service versus greed. A simple distinction. But try to find a mainstream expert or institution to tell you that. You probably won’t succeed. That’s because the people who profit from private enterprise greed have a stranglehold on our lives. They tell us – over and over and over – that we’re freer and happier when they have a stranglehold over our lives. If your eighteen year old has to pay $12,000 a year for auto insurance, that’s because we’re all free and happy and making our own personal choices. The endless mantra for a few hundred years has been “greed is normal. Be greedy”.

One of the big interruptions to the flow of that “philosophy” came about with the Russian Revolution in 1917. Whatever went wrong with it, the people who led the Revolution said the free enterprise system is a fraud and a cheat, and a huge number of people in the world believed them. Then a 75-year fight went on between the IDEAS of those revolutionary leaders and free enterprise.

Not until 1936 and the so-called Spanish Civil War did the forces of free enterprise really show their hand. And when they did … it was awful…. That’s when a lot of people began to notice. And that’s when almost all the institutions moved their weight to prevent Canadians from noticing the real basis of free enterprise and – perhaps – the future of Canadian society.

Through all the fog, one man, a Canadian doctor, Norman Bethune, began to notice. Not at first. It took him awhile, but then he noticed. What did he see?

Let me tell the story.

Norman Bethune (1890-1939) swept theatrically through the first half of the twentieth century. Disapproved of by Canadian government, he was tracked, spied upon, and recorded for RCMP files - and thunderously approved of in meetings all over Canada. He was actor in two of the most important international/political/military events of the century, and he was as close to being disowned by the Canadian elite as was possible. And he was praised in writing at the time of his early death by China’s revolutionary leader Mao Tse-Tung. With that praise, Bethune became, and still is, a household name in China.

Now he has become – remarkably – a symbol in the struggle against “globalization”, the struggle to prevent major (mostly U.S.) corporations from stripping the world’s population of decent living standards, from erecting a monstrous class system and replacing genuine democracy with corporate rule backed by private armies and the military forces of dominated states.

Bethune was a dynamo. He was – first and foremost – a brilliant, iconoclastic medical practitioner who extended boundaries, smashed class walls, invented, initiated, prophesied, and theorized – all importantly. He wrote excellent poetry. He painted brilliantly. He wrote prose that was always good and sometimes superb. He developed an analysis of the clash of real forces in the world. He lived his life, in his last years, in the context of his analysis; and he died serving the forces (as he saw them) that were working for a humane future for all humankind.

Born of a “good” family in Gravenshurst, Ontario, he went to the University of Toronto, worked at a Frontier College outpost with the labourers teaching them English literacy at night, went as a medic to the First World War, was wounded on the battlefield, and ended the war in the Canadian Navy.

Interning in a London hospital in 1919, he spent a good part of the “Roaring Twenties” well-heeled and “roaring”. He travelled Europe, lived luxuriously, collected and casually “dealt” in art works, and took up a post in Detroit, U.S.A. where money was flowing freely in 1924. In 1926 he contracted tuberculosis and seemed doomed. In the sanatorium he studied his disease, learned ‘frontier’ techniques of treatment, healed from one of them, and burst back into Canadian (Montreal) life as the 1929 Depression struck.

There he saw the sick in a country of (literally) untold wealth being crippled and dying because health services were operated for private profit. The rich could be healthy; the rest could die. Bethune proposed socialized medicine, medicare. He noticed the unemployed beaten by the police when they demonstrated peacefully in pursuit of work and community support. He saw them thrown into the street when they couldn’t pay rent. Something, he noticed, was deeply wrong with his society.

In 1935, for all those reasons, he went to Russia to observe. (Formally, he went to a conference). He was one of many Westerners who visited Russia in those years and were very impressed. They weren’t all fools, and whatever went wrong with Stalinist Russia, many observers saw, at the time, a huge opportunity to develop something very different from the raging social injustice at home. Among them were Beatrice and Sidney Webb (who created the London School of Economics and The New Statesman), George Bernard Shaw, and the Dean of Canterbury. That last, Hewlitt Johnson, the Dean of Canterbury, wrote a book just before the Second World War started, called The Socialist Sixth of the World.

In it he wrote of the perversion of science and religion by capitalism. “If capitalism thwarts science”, he wrote, “it also outrages Christianity, making impossible the Christian demand for justice, freedom, a creative abundant life, and an ever-widening fellowship for the human soul”. Hewlitt Johnson, the Dean of Canterbury, had noticed what the Canadian doctor was learning: that capitalism without stern controls upon it ravages the human spirit and destroys societies.

Bethune was impressed with Russian achievements in medicine, and he was excited to see the free and increasingly effective public healthcare system the Russians were building. Social injustice was being addressed in the “new” Russia, and was not in Canada.

Bethune asked “Why?” The answer he formed shaped the rest of his life and his place in the twenty-first century as a symbol of the struggle against globalization.

When the Spanish Civil War came, he knew it was a conflict to determine the history of the next century. It wasn’t, in fact, a civil war at all, but a war of theWestern powers who were fighting to determine the economic system of the future. It led, moreover, to the war with Nazi Germany – the war that was never supposed to happen.

Bethune and the many others observed Russian experiments with social ownership, social insurance measures, and the denial of capitalism, They saw a Russian people enthusiastic about the new way. Western elites became more and more offended at the enthusiasm being expressed in the West. Western elites were determined the new way wouldn’t spread….

In 1936 in Spain a coalition government was chosen by democratic election. It was not a communist government; it was made up of parties wanting reform of the Spanish social system, and communists formed a part (not a dominant part) of the coalition. In Britain and the U.S.A. especially, (Canada being a very junior partner), the elites were alarmed. Spain was seen as an arena where socialist and “progressive” ideas would be put into practice and would be influential in the West. The Spanish government had – somehow – to be defeated and replaced. How could it be done?

Somehow (?) the Spanish military produced the reactionary rebel, General Francisco Franco. He was – in fact – supported by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, both of whom supplied huge amounts of “military aid”. The Italian Fascists sent tens of thousands of troops to help him. The so-called “democratic” countries of the West couldn’t openly intervene on the part of Franco, and so they made a non-intervention agreement. Some help for the constitutionally legitimate government came from Russia. But the European powers and the U.S. did nothing to help the legitimate government, worked against it behind closed doors, and stood back while the Nazis and Fascists gave overwhelming support to the Franco forces, guaranteeing they would be victorious and would set up the Franco dictatorship following that “civil war”.

The outcome of the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath happened because the capitalist West was determined to stop IDEAS flooding out of Russia about new, fairer ways of operating economies and cultures. Neither Nazism nor Fascism was anti-capitalist. (Nazi Germany used IBM throughout the Second World War to organize the efficiency of the death camps, for instance. Adolf Hitler urged Henry Ford to run for U.S. president.)

The West hoped to use the Nazis and the Fascists to deal with Spain and then hoped to point them Eastwards to deal with Soviet Russia. As a result they did all they could (out of sight of their populations) to help Franco destroy the democratically elected government of Spain. When W.L Mackenzie King, Canada’s Prime Minister, visited Adolf Hitler in 1937, his diary reveals he was positively impressed by Hitler and thought him a fine leader of his people. Nazi atrocities in Spain were public by 1937, and in Germany they had been visible for a longer time.

Adolf Hitler, did not, however, intend to be an office-boy for the West. He was happy to neutralize Spain by putting a fascist dictator in power. But his ambitions were to conquer European countries with which Britain had treaties and/or friendly agreements. If Hitler had headed straight for Russia, opening only an Eastern front and negotiating passage through Poland, there would not have been a Second World War. The Western powers would have secretly helped him battle Russia as they helped him battle Spain. They would very likely have closed their eyes to the mass murder of Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals and political dissidents in Germany. The western powers would have found reasons to stay “neutral”. But Hitler wouldn’t behave. He took Austria, Czechoslovakia, and invaded Poland, and when war was declared swept up France and Belgium in a matter of weeks.

The Western alliance with Russia was always a “phony” alliance. Stalin was convinced (probably correctly) that the West delayed opening a second front of military operation in Europe to allow Nazi forces to concentrate on the destruction of Russia. The British also broke the secret Nazi military code during the war but wouldn’t tell their Russian “allies”. As a result Britain and the U.S. often knew of Nazi preparations to make murderous attacks upon parts of Russia – and they never alerted their Russian “allies”. At the very outset of the War, the Dean of Canterbury in The Socialist Sixth of the World (1939) remarks that Britain’s strategy in the five months preceding the war “was based upon a dual policy, that of keeping the door open to an agreement with Moscow, whilst attempting still to come to an agreement with Hitler against Moscow.”(p. 380)

When the Second World War ended, the West was at least equally responsible for the quick rift with Russia, for the Iron Curtain separating Europe and Russia, and for the Cold War which was merely an extension of policy already clearly evident in the so-called Spanish Civil War. That’s why Bethune went to Spain at the time, and why he lectured all over Canada on the meaning of the struggle in Spain. He had noticed. He had noticed that the “Western powers” were willing to support Nazism and Fascism to prevent even muted ideas of social equality gaining ground.

That’s why he went to China to help in the battle against Japanese imperialism in 1938. His experience of brutal indifference to suffering in Canada and his assessment of Russian experiments in social justice as he saw them in 1935 made him decide to take membership in the Communist Party, a common decision at the time. Major Canadian poet Dorothy Livesay became a member of the Young Communist League in those years. Asked four decades later why she had done so, Livesay answered that anyone caring about human justice and liberty could, at that time, only go into the Communist Party.

In going to China Bethune took part in what many historians consider an event as important as the French Revolution (1789) and the Russian Revolution (1917). He saw the conflict in China as a part of his fight for public medicine in Canada and his fight against the capitalist/fascist forces in Spain. “Spain and China”, he wrote “are part of the same battle”.

Canadians who notice are becoming more and more aware that Bethune’s seemingly meaningless statement is full of meaning for our time as globalization and corporate power grow. As “globalizing” pressure increases to destroy social insurance for ordinary people, to “privatize’ (that is, to hand to corporate control for profit) health services, energy supplies, access to water, education – and more – Canadians see that Norman Bethune’s struggle was one that is continuing in our time.

Beginning as a carefree, sybaritic, art and luxury loving youth, Bethune began to see deeply into the Canadian and then the global society of which he was a part. Noticing the needless suffering of the poor and unemployed in Canada, he noticed that class war really exists, that most of those who “have” are quite willing to do nothing about the suffering of those who “have not”. In Canada he gave more and more of his time to the victims of class war, to those who “have not”.

After Bethune’s death, and after the Second World War, corporations and Western governments knew they had to give ordinary people a measure of social justice and a decent standard of living in order to hold off the lure of socialist society. With all its innumerable (and sometimes monstrous) faults, Russia served to protect Canadian Social Insurance.

What an irony. People who saw Russia as an enemy were protected by it. They possessed social services and living standards guaranteed by the “threat” of the “socialist powers” gaining ground in the West. Even Prince Charles remarked early - after the fall of the Berlin Wall - that he regretted the loss of “the balance” provided in the world by the Soviet Union.

Canadians are beginning to notice again that something is very wrong with the economic system. War is an open policy of U.S. economic expansionism. Corporations are making obscene profits and CEOs are grabbing obscene payoffs. The ‘free enterprise system’ is rife with corruption that goes unchecked. Attacks on the social security of ordinary people are conducted daily. A reactionary premier, Ralph Klein, even stops at an overnight shelter for the homeless in order to give them a tongue lashing for being homeless. The forces that front for corporate policy are using any dirty tricks to get power – in Canada they call it “Uniting the Right”.

Canadians are relearning what carefree, sybaritic, art and luxury loving Norman Bethune was taught by the Great Depression and the War in Spain. They are noticing that where there is no balance provided, capitalism is happy to behave brutally against those who are not wealthy. As Canadians come to understand the forces at work in their contemporary world, to understand that Western capitalism is quite at home with Nazism and Fascism, they begin to see the relevance of the life and work of Norman Bethune. Canadians are noticing. They are beginning to understand the nature of the fight ahead. They are noticing slowly, but they are noticing….

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Robin Mathews publishes on culture, politics, the arts, and Canadian Intellectual history. He lives in Vancouver with his wife, a potter. His column appears regularly on Vive le Canada.

Comments: rmathews@sfu.ca

Note: rmathews@sfu.ca