In a world of cancel culture, where a statue can be pulled down for the failure to achieve 2021 standards in 1867, it seems a bit odd to be honouring a man who learned to love communism in Stalin’s Soviet Union and died serving a country now accused of genocide.
So what to make of a Parks Canada plan to increase visitor traffic at the birthplace of Dr. Norman Bethune, who died in 1939 while aiding communist forces’ efforts to seize power in China?
Blacklock’s Reporter, an Ottawa-based news site focused on government business, reports that Parks Canada will use Mandarin-language services at Bethune Memorial House in Gravenhurst, Ontario as part of a bid to “move visitors, volunteers and partners to act as proud ambassadors of Bethune’s values, achievements and humanitarian ideals” and “introduce Parks Canada to a broader audience, in particular of Chinese descent.” Noting that Bethune’s birthplace is one of Canada’s least-visited national historic sites, it hopes to have it recognized by 2027 as “a place of inspiration.”
Bethune was born in the village north of Toronto in 1890. He served in the First World War, obtained a medical degree and practised as a surgeon in Quebec. “Between 1929 and 1936,” states the Canadian Encyclopedia , “he invented or redesigned 12 medical and surgical instruments and wrote 14 articles describing his innovations in thoracic technique.”
All good until 1935 when, on a visit to the Soviet Union, he became enamoured by communism. In Spain during the Spanish civil war he organized a mobile blood transfusion system, then joined Mao Zedong’s 8th Route Army in China, dying in the field while treating wounded soldiers and civilians. Mao published a eulogy heaping praise on the Canadian doctor for serving the communist cause, taking the “Leninist line” and dying “a martyr at his post” at a time communist ascendancy was anything but assured.
Beijing has since elevated Bethune to the status of revolutionary hero, with statues, posters and a place in the Revolutionary Martyrs’ Cemetery. There are universities and medical schools in his name and a commemorative medal awarded for “an individual’s outstanding contribution, heroic spirit and great humanitarianism in the medical field.”
He remained relatively obscure in Canada until former prime minister Pierre Trudeau — who had a soft spot for strongmen like Mao and Cuban dictator Fidel Castro — visited China in 1973. The government bought the Bethune house the same year, turning it over to Parks Canada as a national historic site. Bethune has since become the sort of figure who — like James Naismith or the Mad Trapper of Rat River — gets immortalized in official Canadiana as evidence we do indeed have a fascinating past filled with interesting people.
Donald Sutherland played him in a 1977 CBC drama and subsequently told interviewer Peter Gzowski Bethune “was, in fact, responsible for MASH (Mobile Army Surgical Hospitals),” which happened to be the name of a big movie in which Sutherland starred. Former Governor General Adrienne Clarkson authored a 2009 biography for a series on “ Extraordinary Canadians ” which praised Bethune as “the most famous Canadian in the world … a surgeon, medical inventor, tumultuous romantic, and advocate for the poor.”
Nothing personal against Bethune, who does seem to have been an interesting character dedicated to righting wrongs. But that’s not what’s supposed to matter any more. Under cancel culture, we don’t judge people by their beliefs, attitudes or actions in relation to the times they lived, but the degree to which their activities fit within current benchmarks. Sir John A. Macdonald is no longer a visionary leader who played a crucial role in creating an independent Canada, but a racist ideologue who persecuted Indigenous peoples while holding colonialist beliefs. His statues are vandalized , his name torn from schools , his very existence treated as an embarrassment for which to beg forgiveness. It doesn’t matter that he lived in a time when accepted norms differed from ours, it only matters that if he was alive today and acted the same way, we would condemn him.
When Bethune reached the Soviet Union in 1935, Joseph Stalin had consolidated his one-man rule and forced through his system of collective farms , resulting in mass deportations and a deliberate policy of starvation that produced an estimated 14 million deaths. He was about to launch what became known as “ the great terror ” with hundreds of thousands of executions and millions sent to forced labour camps.
A decade after Bethune’s death Mao would formally declare formation of the People’s Republic and launch a disastrous series of projects — the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution — that would rival Stalin in body count.
Bethune couldn’t have foreseen any of this, and he was far from the only person of his time to be duped by Marxist visions of a more perfect world. But if Macdonald can be disowned by his home town of Kingston, which is busy finding ways to dissociate itself from Canada’s first prime minister, how can Ottawa promote greater glorification of a figure who served a regime now accused of genocide, forced labour, re-education camps and the arbitrary detention of innocent Canadians over a dispute involving a Chinese billionaire’s daughter?
According to cancel culture, forces of righteousness should be marching on Gravenhurst at this very moment. Lock the doors. Hide the children. No statue is safe when virtue is on the move.
National Post
Copyright Postmedia Network Inc., 2021
