Saturday, November 07, 2009

Against Triumphalism: The Complex Legacy of 1989

Fred Halliday observes that 20 years on, there is much to celebrate in communism's collapse, but at the same time much horror followed. Putting 1989 in its proper global perspective forces us to recognize "other, less liberal and less welcome outcomes of the Soviet retreat; and the consequences of these events are very much alive today."

Similarly counterintuitive, it's instructive to recall the American origins of Canadian socialism:

3 Comments:

Blogger Bernard said...

The link is not correct

http://www.opendemocracy.net/fred-halliday/other-1989s

10:56 AM  
Blogger Terry Glavin said...

Found another with a version of same. Thanks.

12:01 PM  
Blogger Unknown said...

I hope this will at the very least give pause to anyone in the Canadian Studies program at SFU who had to endure the obnoxious Canadian nationalist Robin Matthews, a man whose life's work it was to identify and expunge all American ideas and any Americans or Canadians who allegedly promoted American ideas in schools, in the arts and in the media, from Canadian public life.

For Matthews, Northrop Frye, Margaret Atwood, Mordechai Richler and 1960's era Vancouverite poetry collectives were all agents for the US imperialist regime and any professor or teaching assistant in a Canadian university who happened to be born on American soil was to be "outed" and fired.

Undoubtedly Matthews, a stalwart Dipper with a blog, would dismiss the irony that his lifelong campaign to purge American ideas from Canadian life would also have been a campaign to purge the CCF from Canada had he been around a tad earlier.

2:59 AM  

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