It is a supreme irony that Ontario’s Peel District School Board should fall victim to “woke” activism of the “cancel culture” persuasion, militancy unrepresentative of Canadian majority opinion.
They should be. Such purges are reminiscent of the Nazi book-burnings in Berlin on May 10, 1933, in which 25,000 books considered “insufficiently German” were consigned to the flames on account of the “racial impurity” of such “cultural diversity” as Germany then enjoyed. “Where one burns books,” the German writer Heinrich Heine warned, “one will soon burn people.” This was prophetic: Nazi evil was to consume millions of innocent lives.
After the war, French activists wishing to erase all traces of Nazi ignominy by burning the written works of its villains were as misguided as the congregation in southern Ontario that reportedly recently held its own bonfire of books allegedly describing black people in a derogatory manner. Two wrongs do not make a right. More importantly, allegations of wrongdoing need to be seen and publicly challenged, not buried. This is why Auschwitz exists today, as a memorial. One must never hide or forget the past, warts and all.
The latest woke scandal, in Peel, is profoundly ironic because Ontario’s public school system has been a bastion of opposition to authoritarianism and totalitarian rule, secure in its affirmation of the need for critical thinking, independence of thought, respect for the rule of law, and, significantly, for its commitment to student freedom to read widely in its own libraries. Freedom of speech and assembly, democratic government answerable to its public, and open debate and discussion are also Canadian birthrights. My own high-school library even contained two copies of Hitler’s “Mein Kampf,” unexpected but tolerated in a school with many Jewish students. Both the English and history curricula make commitments to thoughtful enquiry clear in books recommended for study in Ontario high schools.
Four well-known examples of English texts should suffice to prove this:
George Orwell’s “1984” and his “Animal Farm” have both long been on the curriculum. “1984” is an expose of totalitarianism written in the shadow of communism, whose repressive regimes held sway in eastern Europe for more than 40 years after the end of World War II. It depicts a duplicitous tyranny bent on falsifying the past, distorting the meanings of words, and monitoring the actions and even the thoughts of its subjects. “Animal Farm” is a fable about the deceptions of politicians posing as champions of “progressive thought” who turn out to be worse than those of the regime they replace.
I vividly recall a Vietnamese ESL student of mine telling my regular English class of the horrors inflicted on her family following the fall of Saigon to Communist aggression in 1975, and an Iranian refugee, also an ESL pupil, expressing gratitude to Canada for her deliverance from Ayatollah Khomeini’s fundamentalist autocracy. Both students’ comments were inspired by Orwell’s understanding of the nature of repressive regimes.
Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451” is a nightmare vision of a future in which the reading of books is prohibited. “Firemen” are summoned to offenders’ homes to burn their books because the authorities fear the ideas contained in them. The salvation for such a society lies in its outcasts, eccentrics who live a twilight existence on the fringes of society, and whose purpose it is to memorize entire books worth saving for the benefit of posterity.
William Golding’s “Lord of the Flies” is a corrective to the naive belief that good intentions alone are sufficient for a healthy society. Ralph is a decent, well-meaning, and legitimately elected leader of a group of castaways on a tropical island who comes to the painful realization that all human beings, himself included, are capable of evil acts. Written at a time of hope for a better future for mankind, the novel is a study of the threat to civilized values by those who seek power by threat, fear, and violence.
High-school history properly stresses the development of responsible government in Canada, from her colonial past to her emergence as a self-governing democracy, a friend to nations that respect the dignity of others, and a foe of terrorist expansionism. The formative influences of Magna Carta, the parliamentary system, common law, the contribution of the “French fact” to national life, and the legacy of two world wars in which Canada opposed bullying aggressors, are all studied carefully and critically.
Canada is a nation where debate, informed discussion, and cautious compromise have produced a law-abiding, moderate, and tolerant society that has welcomed refugees, avoided civil war, and shunned revolutionary sentiment and extremist behaviour. While American history celebrates “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, Canada less histrionically aims to maintain “peace, order, and good government.” Long may she continue to honour these worthy goals.
Such convictions are ill-served by the Peel board’s attempts to censor reading. Students are intelligent enough to make their own decisions about what to read outside the curriculum. They can always seek advice from wise parents and trusted teachers. They do not need Big Brother to oversee their discoveries. As an immigrant myself, a retired English teacher and former department head, I claim these truths as self-evident. I lived them in 33 years of service.
The displaced books must be returned to the shelves. The nazifying of our schools must cease. You do not “diversify” by removing library books, surreptitiously or otherwise. Restricting readers’ choice to “approved” titles—as totalitarian regimes have done in Nazi Germany and the former Soviet Union and its puppet states, in Islamist dictatorships, and in communist China—is anathema.
The notoriously dishonest acronym DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion), used to denote the woke trio of goals, is more accurately “division, exclusion, and intimidation.” Since this is the woke “death-wish” consummation for the traditional Canadian virtues of openness, balance, moderation, reason, and the transmission of our valued inherited culture, the acronym is in reality “DIE,” not “DEI.” They can’t spell, either.