Beginning with a Confession

As if there was a choice—writing confesses our shared guilt in the dead of naming. Cursed with the inefficiencies of partial disasters in a land of grace and extremes.

A Canadian.

Beginning with an exile, driven by the need and desire for communal memory within a disparate common. Confessing one’s nationality as a means of seeking utopia, as if there were a more worthy direction.

A Repressed Enthusiasm: The Case of The Missing Vital Sign of Canadian History: 1836/1837

Spin doctors and fake news were at work long before the internet or television.

Conservatively written histories dismiss the nationalistic and idealistic forces of this revolution, labeling it a mere ‘farmers rebellion’—an anomaly that highlights a compliant population.  The absence of further revolts against imperialism wasn’t due to fear, they say, but a sensible respect for authority. 

“This was almost too much for human patience... the city would have been ours in an hour probably without firing a shot; hundreds of our friends waited to join us at its entrance; the officials were terror-struck; Gov. Head had few to rely on; the colony would have followed the city; a convention and democratic constitution been adopted, and a bloodless change from a contemptible tyranny to freedom accomplished. But 800 ran where no one pursued, and unfortunately ran the wrong way.”
- William Lyon Mackenzie, Canadian Revolutionary, 1838.

The value of the nation-state aligns with its mythological qualities, equating its political worth to historical events that signal Justice, Freedom, Equality, Intelligence, and Respect. These Enlightenment and Revolutionary ideals, this heritage of radical approaches to social structure, remain unfulfilled.

The nation-state in our global oligarchical system: quaint venues for maintaining tourist trades and placebos for marginal cultural, social, and technological Luddites—struggling lumpen proles.

THE WORLD

The perpetual war of Capital has come home to roost as the struggle for subsistence, magnetized under the invisible velvet-gloved iron hand of —the old fascism on technological speed.

Now, Individualism = The Pathological Eccentricities of Everywhere Narcissism.

Corporations have become the rationale for government existence. People and the very possibility of articulating difference have become subsumed under the logos of the dominant consumer product/lifestyle. The ideals from Liberalism and the Democratic Revolutions that created Nation States have been co-opted by consumerism.

As capital becomes increasingly mobile, the worker, the citizen, the culturally defined, and the nation-state itself become sideshows to the transit and speed of power. Every place becomes either a factory or a tourist trap.

“To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it 'the way it really was'. It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger... Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if the enemy wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.”
- Walter Benjamin.

St. Benoit surrenders. Jean Joseph Girouard, leader of this group, flees. He describes the events: "A considerable number of the inhabitants were assembled in my courtyard and two cannons placed in the gateway were aimed at them while they were told they would be exterminated in a few minutes... No insults or outrages were spared, no threats withheld to intimidate them into declaring the hiding places of their leaders. Scenes of devastation and destruction more atrocious than any seen in a town taken by storm followed. After completely pillaging the village, the enemy set fire to it, reducing it to ashes. They then spread out, ravaging and burning on their way, reaching as far as St. Scholastique."

In Quebec and the rest of Canada, the defeats of 1837/1838 have had both subtle and overt consequences throughout our history.

While I can't predict an alternative future had the Revolution succeeded, it would have ended colonial rule, establishing a collaborative English and French Republican-Revolutionary government. This would have been an auspicious start to collaboration between peoples, providing universal suffrage to the Native population—something the Canadian government only recently granted. It would have created an environment of certainty regarding the nation's viability.

“Politics is the science that teaches the people of a country to care for each other.”
- William Lyon Mackenzie, 1836.

An interesting anecdote—the fate of one Revolutionary leader: “Chénier's heart had been pulled from his body, examined by British Military doctors... an autopsy was performed at The Black Bull, a tavern in St. Eustache. They sought to discover the reason for his death. He had been shot outside the Church, falling by the gravestones in the adjoining cemetery. He was the chief rebel of the St. Eustache Patriotes...”

The official story claims everything was in order. However, war is disorder. The British Government condoned violent reprisals against the Patriote Villages. Why perform an autopsy? What morbid curiosity demanded this 'medical' intervention? Was it not plain that the man died from a gunshot wound?

The unofficial story suggests his heart was used as a symbol of derision, displayed as an item of curiosity, carried through the defeated village on a bayonet. The truth is irrelevant; in the mind of a nation, there are only positions of power and the myths that prop them up.

To be placed is necessary for any concern to be born.