Honourable Mr. Clement,
A notable Canadian is heroic, selfless and worthy of example.
Imagine the average Canadian's surprise when they read this (emphasis mine):
The thing about Dr. Bethune is that people see different things about him depending on their perspective,” Mr. Clement said. “I think we as Conservatives can be comfortable that there’s a message here broader than just his communism, that goes to his humanism and entrepreneurship.
What would that message be, Mr. Clement? What message could transcend Bethune's chosen alliance with communism, a failed and cruel political system that claimed nearly a hundred million lives worldwide, seventy million of which were from China.
What can excuse your or your party's overlooking this very pertinent fact? Had Norman Bethune worked for Adolf Hitler, would you extoll him so? After all, Norman Bethune left Canada to practice medicine elsewhere, specifically for a man to whom seventy million deaths are attributed.
Seventy million deaths.
Imagine for a moment that the entire population of Canada and thirty-six million Americans were killed by a ruthless and callous dictator such as Mao Tse Tung who once declared that half of China would have to die during a famine that decimated its population. Now imagine that a Canadian citizen aided and abetted a dictator who would orchestrate and preside over such genocides and whose bloody legacy extends from the mainland to the divided Koreas and southeast Asia. Does that person represent the best of Canadians? Does he possess- as you put it- "humanism and entrepreneurship"? He certainly didn't want to earn a living from the medicine he practiced in China where he died unceremoniously of septicemia in the filthy and unscrupulous conditions that still remain. I suppose the sainted Bethune's influence did not take.
How desperate are you and your party to appeal to the very country that robs your countrymen of livelihoods?
As the Conservatives court Chinese investment in the resource sector and try to develop closer relationships with Chinese leaders, the malleable Bethune connects governments and people that haven’t always shared interests.
That you would honour an avowed communist to sway a dictatorship you should know spies on Canadian interests is inexcusable. That you would have us pay for it is baffling.
If I didn't know better, I would suggest you didn't care about this country, its reputation, its resources or its people.
This two point five million dollar monstrosity dedicated to a communist who served a still-existing dictatorship does not convince me otherwise.
I do hope you will reconsider.
Yours',
a very, very displeased citizen
4 comments:
Bethune died in 1939, when the Kuomintang regime was still in power, long before Mao's ascent. At that point in Chinese history, the China was governed by the Kuomintang under Chiang Kai Shek, whose record of corruption and oppression was pretty well known.
Hitler and Japan (which was occupying Manchuria at the time) had just signed the Anti-Comintern pact, and Hitler was jailing communists.
This is curious, Balbulican. You're seldom seen here.
Bethune turned his back on his country and aided both the Spanish and Chinese communists who executed scores of clergy, farmers and other citizens respectively. Who allies themselves with the likes of Mao Tse Tung who had an indifference to his own wife and newborn daughter (born during the Long March)and his own men border on the sociopathic, his willingness to make an alliance with Chiang (under Moscow's orders) and ultimately his tyrannical rule that would ruin China, separate and embattle Korea and start the land wars in southeast Asia (all of this in "The Unknown Story of Mao" by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday)? Am I also to believe that a man who nicked his finger and died of septicemia should be revered for replacing archaic Chinese herbal medicine with something that resembles Western medicine? The Falun Gong trafficked organ donors must be thrilled.
Thanks for posting.
Never seen here before, I think. Nice site!
You're quite right, it IS a shame that Bethune wasn't gifted with clairvoyance.
By the way, the Chang-Halliday book is an interesting corrective to the reverent idealization of hagiographers like Edgar Snow, but it's not great history; as you probably noticed, many of the juicier stories are weakly sourced and anecdotal. A better source is Ross Terrill's "Mao - A Biography". (Terrill also did an excellent and quite horrific biography of Chiang Ch'ing, Mao's wife.)
Well, thank you.
Bethune worked with both the Spanish and the Chinese communists. He met with Mao personally. Even if one were to believe he was naive, there is still no excusing him. He supported a failed and cruel political system and a future dictator.
The book I sourced was very well researched with even Russian sources supporting the content therein. "The Black Book of Communism" says the same things.
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