This column first appeared in the Victoria Daily Times on March 2, 1940.
Words fall into bad company, like people, and acquire a bad name quite innocently.
Take the word “propaganda” — a proper word, which began life innocently enough when Pope Urban VIII in 1623 set up a college called the College of Propaganda, to prepare priests for missionary work. Unfortunately for the word, it is now associated in our minds with the name of Goebbels and concentration camps and secret police.
But we cannot let it go at that. There is something we should be doing, here in Canada, with our own people. We have been too tight-lipped and sure of ourselves. Let us not be too sure that all our peoples’ minds are unaffected by foreign propaganda. Someone should be speaking out for Canada, early and often. We take too much for granted.
There are two bodies of opinion doing injury to Canadian thinking. Class A are the fundamentalists (I do not mean to start a theological discussion), I mean the people who believe that the British Empire has always been right; could never do wrong; that anyone who ever dares to question any action of the British Empire is boring under the foundation of law and order, and should be tried as a traitor.
I have many of these fundamentalists among my friends, and I envy them their peace of mind, and gladly admit that they are delightful people to know.
When one of the members of the B.C. legislature criticized British rule on the floor of the House, the fundamentalists had just one remedy for her — deportation. A fellow member, who belongs to Class A, too, in the heat of anger recommended corporal punishment. But he did not get a seconder, and after a spate of letters, full of sound and fury, the incident dies away.
No one was any wiser or better, and some hard things had been said on both sides. I do not know yet just what was said by a member, but I am quite sure it could have been answered, and without abuse. Vilification is not argument.
Class B are the subversive ones, who remember every mistake ever made by the British Empire; who tell half a story, who twist the truth to suit themselves. Father Coughlin is a good example. He pours out hatred for Britain on the radio, and is eagerly listened to by hundreds of thousands. He is an emotional, illogical, dangerous man, who appeals to the baser passions of men.
He does no harm to the intelligent listener, for the intelligent listener tunes him out. But we should not ignore such a stream of vituperation and half-truths.
For my country I have always craved something similar to Hyde Park in London, where any person can speak on any subject that is not indecent. A place where old spites and grievances can be drawn into the open. I know it sounds like a Donnybrook Fair, with broken heads and black eyes. Election time is not just the psychological moment for launching such a project. But that will soon be over.
A letter from a woman in one of the prairie provinces started this vein of thought. She is evidently a woman of intelligence, but the victim of gross misinformation. She took violent objection to my reference to the Finns and their gallant stand against Russia. She said I had become an apologist for war and a defender of the capitalistic system. She said Russia is fighting for the liberation of the workers in Finland, etc.
She is an Englishwoman, and her husband served in the last war. Now, it’s easy to wave such cases aside and put it down to ignorance and Communistic literature, but these are our people; we can’t desert them. They are the victims of half-truths.
We need something direct and personal. Now with our means of communication we can reach 84 per cent of the people in Canada by radio.
Situations change overnight. The whole face of Russia has changed since the leaders of the 1917 Revolution have been purged. Litvinoff and his associates, who had a vision of brotherhood and the emancipation of labourers from ignorance are gone, and black tyranny rules in their place. What was true six months ago is not true now.
Now, instead of holding on to the old hope that Russia was solving some of the problems of production and distribution (in which many of us shared), we have to accustom ourselves to the black disappointment which comes when Stalin showed his hand in his union with Germany, and in this unprovoked attack on a peaceful country.
We have to begin here and now, without burrowing in the past, for the war is here. We have taken our place with the friends of liberty. There is no turning back. We must strengthen our hearts for the hardest struggle we have ever endured.
Impatient people are crying out in their anguish that God has deserted the world. His church has failed and hope is gone. But they are wrong. We were never promised an easy road. We were promised strength and guidance for a hard road, and that has not failed.
If all the nations of the world were consenting to the injustices and cruelties of the dictators, we might well despair, and say that mankind has gone into slavery. In a booklet that bears the date Dec. 7, 1939, printed in Finland, I read these words, spoken by the president, amid the terror and confusion of massed bombings:
“We do not deny that nearest our hearts are our own homes and the whole system in which we have become rooted, which is not threatened with destruction, but it is just through these values that we have been able to contribute our share to the world’s culture ... The rule of force can be erected only on the ruins of western civilization.”
While people, harassed and tormented, worn in body and soul, in danger, in weariness, torn by anxiety and saddened by loss, can utter words like these, we, in Canada, should cast from us the last bitter suggestion of selfishness and gloom.