My Log 768 October30 2019; Chronicles from my Tenth Decade: 203: Young Trudeau whips out some over-used politicians of yesteryear to ask their advice; I hope none of them ever sings a duet with Trump

Well, this is great news, really great: just what the country needs. A recently-appointed senior advisor to Justin Trudeau’s second-term government  who was, when she was Minister of Natural Resources in the Chretien government  half a generation ago, totally in the pocket of the oil industry. Oh, yes, sure, just what we need when the government is confronted with the imperative need, in the interests of humanity and all other life, to scale back, and eventually to close down entirely, the huge industry that has grown up around the use of fossil fuels. (I can just hear it: “Justin, my dear, for heaven’s sake go easy on them., won’t you.!”)

I am talking about Anne McLellan, PC, OC, AOE, etc, etc, of whom, in the earlier years of my blog I frequently delighted in slipping in a note to the effect that she was unfit to be a minister of the Crown by reason of taking her orders from the oil industry. I coupled her in that designation with John Manley PC, OC ---  the AOC, whatever it means, having escaped him so far.

They were just two politicians apparently held in high regard by their political masters, whose virtues utterly escaped me, except, of course, that one could tell they were valued because they always did what they were told.

Of course, both have gone on to their distinguished rewards for whatever service they  offered to the oil industry (McLellan), and to corporate interests (Manley, who was at various times minister in charge of industry, foreign affairs and finance, and who bowed out to live the good life as the CEO of the Business Council of Canada, an organization that serves as the lobbying firm on behalf of all corporations in Canada.)  

Of course, these are only a couple of my betes noires. I have always been perhaps overly impressed, as a long-time observer of political life, by how many mediocrities inhabit the political jungle, and the wide range of jobs that are handed down to them by grateful governments, who, by and large, comfort themselves with the certain knowledge that the mediocrity, whatever job he or she is called to, will never put a foot wrong, so far as the government is concerned, and can always be depended upon to bring in some utterly worthless recommendations for actions that, mercifully, are seldom followed by any action.

Young Trudeau, as I call him because of the need to differentiate him from his father, has shown a tendency to depend on unelected advisers, his use of the previous Conservative Prime Minister Mulroney as an envoy to Washington during the re-negotiation of NAFTA being an especially egregious example. (Mind you, I am not exactly a dispassionate observer in relation to this subject: during the negotiation of the original NAFTA one Sunday in Ottawa I was walking in the park with one of my sons, who ran across a schoolmate of his, walking with his father Derek Burney who was negotiating the treaty on Mulroney’s behalf: ordinary courtesy demanded that I shake hands with the man on introduction, and I remember I did so with a sinking heart and a plunging self-esteem at my shambolic weakness in being willing to touch the flesh of a man whose life was devoted to supporting Brian Mulroney. I sincerely regretted that I did not have the courage  of a film-making friend of mine who had followed Mulroney through his campaign for re-election, and on one occasion found himself  in a crowd that was greeting the great man.  He waited for the leader to shove out his hand towards him,  then grabbed him and pulling him in suddenly whispered, “You fucking traitor!”)

Mulroney, another Canadian politician who has retired to a life of splendour provided by the (mostly) American corporations whose interests he unhesitatingly served while he was supposed to be responding to the needs of Canadians, has in recent months given a number of interviews --- maybe there was just one and it ground on me to such a point that I keep multiplying it in imagination --- in which he said the overwhelming advice he offered any Canadian Prime Minister was that his first --- and it seemed from the emphasis he gave  he meant the only  indispensible job of a Canadian Prime Minister was to keep good relations with the President of the United States.  One bears painful memories of how far Mulroney would go to achieve that --- his singing of  When Irish Eyes are Smiling, in a duet with Ronald Reagan was a really cringe-worthy occasion on a stage in Quebec City during the ill-named Shamrock Summit.

I had better not  keep on with this: I have such a list of political bêtes noires gathered over my log and undistinguished career in journalism that I fear I would test the patience of my audience too far.

The sort of political humour I prefer was exemplified by the great British (rather, Welsh) minister Aneurin Bevan, founder of Britain’s  National Health Service who, while I was working in the car-making centre of Coventry, visited the city to speak to a huge meeting in a crowded theatre of striking workers from the car factories, who were all members of an Engineering Workers Union.

Bevan was introduced, and to a rustle of anticipatory approval he slumped forward to the microphone set up at centre stage, hunched over it, and said, in his melodious Welsh accent: “They tell me the Engineers have been naughty again!”

I never heard a response like it, not even to the great actors I later saw on the London stage, actors who could manipulate a crowd and draw from them every emotion known to humanity.  This crowd leaped to their feet, and roared their approval, their defiance of the powers of authority, for five minutes or more.

An event of wit, grace and passion of an unforgettable quality. A real Wot the hell moment!

My Log 767 October 22 2019: Chronicles from my Tenth Decade: 202: A feeble voice raised against the insistence of the pollsters; one reminiscence from the days before polling was mandatory, when I found the lone man who, as it happened, got it all right

Ever since that day in 1969 when I chased W.A.C (“Wacky”) Bennett, the long-time Premier of British Columbia, through the corridors of a high school in Salmon Arm, in the interior of that beautiful province, hoping to ask him how he could continue to support in the current election one of his local candidates who had recently been convicted of beating his wife, ever since that time, I have never believed opinion polls should be allowed in the run-up to elections.

It has always seemed to me that such polls are not so much polls of current opinion as they have become guides to bewildered voters on how to vote, and, when used aggressively, almost as orders to the doubtful telling them how they must vote. One might almost say that at such times, the relevant authorities use these polls as a means of issuing orders to hesitant voters as to how, where, when and for whom they must register their vote.

I came to that conclusion because Wacky Bennett had forbidden the publication of such polls in the weeks leading up to elections, thus, at a single stroke, depriving all the wiseacres in the local press of their indispensible tool in their ceaseless efforts to pretend to know what had been going on before their eyes.

You have only to cover one election to realize how little understanding any reporter can have of the movement of opinion as the campaign proceeds, that is, in the absence of any poll purporting to foretell the results.  I covered that BC provincial election diligently, talked to as many voters as I could find, who probably amounted to about 100 or so, and was then expected, on the basis of those 100 conversations,  to pronounce learnedly on the issue of the general opinion, and the mysteries of its supposed changes.

That is the situation absent polling. The situation is totally changed with the publication of these polls: suddenly, every reporter covering the event uses the poll results as his or her guide to the way things are moving. They do this because it is the only guide available to them, without which they would simply have to exercise their judgment arrived at by the judicious application of their own experience and knowledge and intuition.

Quite impossible, of course, but I tried. The fact was, Wacky Bennett, a smalltown hardware merchant who later founded the first  B.C. vineyard for the production of wine, had always been attracted to the idea of politics, and by 1969 was entering his twelfth campaign, his seventh election as British Columbia’s irrepressible premier, after five false starts, making him the longest-serving premier in the history of British Columbia.   He started off in his late thirties as a member of the Progressive-Conservatives, then joined another, Labour, party in an unsuccessful coalition, and by the time I was chasing him around the high school, he had already run an eccentric but highly successful provincial government for 17 years.  Although he had gotten into politics as leader of the Social Credit League, an idea imported from Alberta, he never showed any interest in the monetary theories of Social Credit, or in the fanatical right-wing religion with which it was combined in Alberta, and, truth to tell, even though he had bequeathed to his province such publicly-owned institutions as B.C. Ferries, B.C. Hydro, B.C. Rail and the Bank of British Columbia, it did seem that the populace had had about as much of him as they could stand after all those years.

Certainly Tom Berger, the leader of the New Democratic Party in B.C. in 1969 --- and incidentally one of the few Canadians of my acquaintance who I would be prepared to describe as “a great Canadian” no ifs or buts, whose own legacy to the nation is immense --- was totally convinced he was on the path to a certain victory in the election, as, coincidentally, were all of the residents, those 100 or so long-suffering citizens  whose opinion I had tried to canvass in my coverage. I had met only one man who was convinced that Wacky would not only win the election but would win with an increased majority of votes and seats. And that man was Wacky himself. A totally ridiculous idea, of course completely out of touch with the prevailing opinion, which had Wacky retiring from a heavy defeat, his tail between his legs, always supposing, of course, that anyone would be foolish enough to apply such a metaphor to the ever-ebullient Premier Wacky.

Well,, what d’yuh know? Not only did Wacky win the election, his seventh in a row, but he did so with an increased majority, leaving Berger and his NDP wallowing in the pain of a 38 seats to 12 humiliating defeat. Along the way I had enlivened the readers of The Montreal Star with a story that began by saying the electors of BC had discovered the man to save them from socialism--- it was Tom Berger, leader of the NDP.  A nice little joke, but one that suggested  that the local “socialist” party, like so many others in so many other places and at so many other times, might have been better off to have stuck to their original beliefs, rather than constantly trimming them to the winds of electoral convenience, a method which has led to their party being hardly worth supporting by the time they are finally elected to office (pace Bob Rae’s Ontario NDP government in 1990), if ever such a drastic event should overcome them, which I have to admit is seldom enough.

I have been brought to these reflections about polling by the excessive power granted in these days to election polling, as manifested in our recent national election. I suppose one could say that there would be no harm in polling if, say, one poll were published a month before the election, and then left to work its magic, if any, along with all the other influences that work to influence voters.  But that is not what  is happening nowadays. The CBC, for example, has its own resident pollster, Eric Grenier, whose conclusions are not merely published by the network but are forcibly shoved down our throats through constant repetition --- not just almost every day as we approached the election, but sometimes even more than once a day, sometimes it seemed, two and even three appearances, telling us in no uncertain terms, for example,  that both sides are equal, and the possibility of a minority government is looming before us all, not only telling us this, but insisting on it forcibly, as if it were a dictate handed down from on high, irrefutable and unquestionable.  The impact is worse, of course, when Grenier’s conclusions are taken up by one of the network’s bird-brain programme moderators, who translate his recital of likelihoods into  fact, as if the election has already been held and the conclusion announced. 

I kid you not: I have heard it from  the very lips of these young men and women who spoke, even before the vote was announced, as if the die was already cast, the decision made, or on the way to being made, and the conclusions more or less irrefutable.

This sort of insistence on the elevation of this tool to a position given more prominence than others is an insult to the intelligence of the voters, who are none the less told how important it is for them to vote to maintain the democratic purity of our system. In fact, one can tell from the sort of comments provided in advance of polling by prospective voters, that all this brainwashing by pollsters has already had its effect, and they are intending to vote in such as way as to make the prognostications of the pollsters more real than the vote itself.

Oh, dear, oh dear… can’t they just let us all vote, for whichever side we favour, and the devil take the hindmost?

My Log 766 October 16 2019: Chronicles from my Tenth Decade 201: Some reflections on Western attitudes to freedom of expression; every achievement in life depends on a full belly to begin with; we have a great deal to learn from what is happening around the world right now

I have  been reading through reports of political and social opinions  in Europe that have been sampled over the last few decades by Pew Research.

“Most Poles, Czechs and Lithuanians, and more than 40% of Hungarians and Slovaks, for example, said they felt most people in their countries were better off than 30 years ago; in Russia, Ukraine and Bulgaria, more than half felt things were worse.

“Asked how they felt their countries had advanced, central and eastern Europeans were most positive about education (65%), living standards (61%) and national pride (58%). They were less happy about about law and order (44%) and family values (41%), and a majority (53%) said healthcare had got worse in the post-communist era.”

I have been trying to reconcile these views against what I have always understood to be the prevailing Western viewpoint about Communism, whether in Europe, China or Latin America, which to summarize, held that “people are in chains, freedom of expression does not exist, political expression is confined to one-party, and law and order is conducted arbitrarily against anyone who expresses dissent from the prevailing orthodoxy.”  A description of hell on earth.

Although I never lived in an authoritarian one-party state, I have always bowed to the opinion often expressed to me by my peers that in such a state I would very quickly have been whipped off to jail if I had ever tried to exercize the level of dissent that I have normally been able to express in Canada with no deletirous result on my ability to make a living.

I am not sure, however, that this is the last word to be said on this subject. I have always felt there is something excessive in the tenacity --- one might almost call it fanaticism --- with which the Western thought process has clung to the view that  freedom of individual expression is a quality that overrides all others.  One surprising Pew figure is that 56 per cent of Europeans delivered from authoritarian governments did not express their satisfaction with the freer system of law and order that they have now found themselves living under.

It has always seemed to me --- I guess ever since that day in 1951 when I first stood on the wharf in Bombay, having just been dumped into the biggest culture shock of my young life as I watched some officials pull the body of a dead man from the harbour, officials who, in response to my breathless inquiry as to what happened to him, merely shrugged and said, “He must have fallen in. Or jumped,” --- that poverty might be the greatest single influence on the exercise, or lack of it,  of human freedom. And that the India into which my wife and I subsequently plunged wide-eyed, and half-terrified by it all, where people had been killing each other only three years before in their millions because of their religious differences, that India had been transformed – the best estimate is of up to 15 million people displaced, between one and two miion people murdered --- into two nations in which hundreds of thousands of them were living under cardboard shelters on the city pavements, where, open for all to see, were the bodies of countless emaciated babies, just about to draw their last breaths.

Following that sharp encounter with the reality of the modern world into which we had so insouciantly embarked, I made it my business to see as much as I could of the areas in which the world’s poorest people live.  I not only lived for several months in an experimental Indian village, whose purpose was to uplift the lives of those many thousands living in surrounding villages, where I got my real lesson in what it is to be one of the world’s poorest people, but later in life I had the chance to visit  a slum now regarded as one of the world’s worst places of human habitation, Kibera, on the outskirts of Nairobi, Kenya.  I also collaborated on making a National Film Board of Canada film about a Latin American favela, or shantytown, built across a hillside above the Ecuadorian capital, Quito, by a group of  impoverished squatters who, under the organizational leadership of a local .communist,  had moved in and begun to establish residence there. That film was really about the best strategies by which the wealth of the Western world might be put to best use in  aid of residents of shantyowns, which, it argued, would be best brought about by the money going directly to the residents, without passing through (usually corrupt) national governments on the way. Finally, I spent three months in 1978 helping with the shooting of a film about an agricultural  commune operating under the Chinese Communist system.

It was against this  limited contact with  the lives of the poorest people on each of the major continents that I drew some conclusions about the limits to what seems to be the western idea of freedom.

For example, how could one talk of freedom for people forced to live in an environment like that of Kibera, which, when I visited it in the mid-eighties, had an estimated population of up to half a million people, we were told, mostly migrants from the villages of east Africa, who found themselves living impoverished lives, with no social services available to them, under minimal forms of government, in a community that could not even organize how to pick up the garbage that was thrown so carelessly into the middle of the main street, a community markd by, in the words of one social worker I met there, “every social problem you might care to mention.”?  

All of these communities were among “the poorest of the poor” in this world. Each was trying to make some impact on its circumstances, but in only one of these was any real improvement in the lives of the residents easily discernable. That was in the Chinese Communist commune established on the North China plain among what one western geographer once described as “the greatest collection of agricultural communities on earth.”

In some six weeks of relentless questioning I gathered enough information about the circumstances of this commune to enable me to classify it as equally poor in income to those other poor communities I had or have since visited on other continents.  Yet this was the only place among them where every citizen had his or her own house built by the commune according to strict rules of communal help; the only place where everyone was employed, either in agriculture (by far the biggest industry), or in small sideline occupations requiring great tenacity and persistence to make them work at all; where every child was in school, with the prospect that any child showing any special talent of whatever kind could be whisked on to some special school for special training; where the general health of the community, based on the system of so-called barefoot doctors, each with six months of medical training,  appeared to be almost on a par with our own; and in which, this the crowning touch, they grew enough food to feed everyone of the 15,000 people who lived in the six villages (known as production brigades), scattered around the commune, with extra food available to sell to surrounding towns.

Within the possibilities usually open around the world to such impoverished communities this achievement was something truly exceptional. Although it was carried out by an authoritarian government which had its ciients under tight control, nevertheless in any accounting of the freedom of citizens to lead a productive life, it has always seemed to me that this Chinese system, as I saw it operating for myself, was superior to the fumbling efforts being made to deal with poverty in more-capitalist orientated societies, where, in fact, the state seemed to be actively working against the solution to poverty conditions, rather than actively working, as in China,  to reduce them.

Having come to understand the history and background to the nearly total destruction of Chinese land and life against which they were struggling, it seemed to me unlikely that the peasantry, the principal beneficiaries of what looked to me like such a successful agricultural effort, would ever permit the State to turn away from Communism. And it was certainly a surprise to discover later that in the very same year we made our film, 1978, the recently-elevated and restored power-behind-the-throne Deng Hsiao Ping, enunciated a whole new direction for the Chinese economy that has set them so firmly on the capitalist road, and with such spectacular results. Following the death of Mao, the Chinese leaders emerged from the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution vowing to espouse a programme Chou En Lai had outlined in 1975, called the Four Modernizations. This was the banner for the wholesale change in direction of the Chinese economy.

Although at that time, 1978,  China wseemed to be groaning with food, food growing in every square inch of land, food piled in huge hea ps on the city streets, food markets bulging with fresh vegetables and cereals, and a distribution system that seemed to share it out as far as one could tell, equally, later history suggests that  the surplus gained from this success was not enough to prompt a successful industrialization of the economy, and so it was concluded that the new direction must be followed, even if it meant abandonment of many of the proudest achievements of Chinese Communism, like the Iron Rice Bowl, guaranteed for every citizen and worker, and so on.

It appears thast most of the draconiasn restrictions on personal behaviour have been relaxed, and China has become almost the opposite of the caricature pedalled in previous times of a society attentive to everyone’s needs. The shorthand casricture I use is that in those days, in internationasl sports, they played by the slogan, ”friendship first, competition second,” and they really seemed to mean it,  whereas in our modern times they seem to be as desperate to win at any cost as are the athletes of every other country.

Whas I set out to say, I guess, is that considerations about freedom of individual expression are out of place in a society that lacks the simple qualities of freedom, such as adequate nourishment and education, secure shelter, devoted nurture, and a path forward towards personal and even deeper goals in life. With these achieved, as the uproar in Hong Kong seems to indicate, new goals lie ahead that have to be fought for.  We should never forget that right now many hundreds of thousands of Chinese students are studying in the West --- 144,000 of them in Canada at last count ---  hoping to bring back with them the best knowledge available in the modern world.

My Log 766 October 16 2019: Chronicles from my Tenth Decade 201:

Some reflections on Western attitudes to freedom of expression; every achievement in life depends on a full belly to begin with; we have a great deal to learn from what is happening around the world right now

I have  been reading through reports of political and social opinions  in Europe that have been sampled over the last few decades by Pew Research.

“Most Poles, Czechs and Lithuanians, and more than 40% of Hungarians and Slovaks, for example, said they felt most people in their countries were better off than 30 years ago; in Russia, Ukraine and Bulgaria, more than half felt things were worse.

“Asked how they felt their countries had advanced, central and eastern Europeans were most positive about education (65%), living standards (61%) and national pride (58%). They were less happy about about law and order (44%) and family values (41%), and a majority (53%) said healthcare had got worse in the post-communist era.”

I have been trying to reconcile these views against what I have always understood to be the prevailing Western viewpoint about Communism, whether in Europe, China or Latin America, which to summarize, held that “people are in chains, freedom of expression does not exist, political expression is confined to one-party, and law and order is conducted arbitrarily against anyone who expresses dissent from the prevailing orthodoxy.”  A description of hell on earth.

Although I never lived in an authoritarian one-party state, I have always bowed to the opinion often expressed to me by my peers that in such a state I would very quickly have been whipped off to jail if I had ever tried to exercize the level of dissent that I have normally been able to express in Canada with no deletirous result on my ability to make a living.

I am not sure, however, that this is the last word to be said on this subject. I have always felt there is something excessive in the tenacity --- one might almost call it fanaticism --- with which the Western thought process has clung to the view that  freedom of individual expression is a quality that overrides all others.  One surprising Pew figure is that 56 per cent of Europeans delivered from authoritarian governments did not express their satisfaction with the freer system of law and order that they have now found themselves living under.

It has always seemed to me --- I guess ever since that day in 1951 when I first stood on the wharf in Bombay, having just been dumped into the biggest culture shock of my young life as I watched some officials pull the body of a dead man from the harbour, officials who, in response to my breathless inquiry as to what happened to him, merely shrugged and said, “He must have fallen in. Or jumped,” --- that poverty might be the greatest single influence on the exercise, or lack of it,  of human freedom. And that the India into which my wife and I subsequently plunged wide-eyed, and half-terrified by it all, where people had been killing each other only three years before in their millions because of their religious differences, that India had been transformed – the best estimate is of up to 15 million people displaced, between one and two miion people murdered --- into two nations in which hundreds of thousands of them were living under cardboard shelters on the city pavements, where, open for all to see, were the bodies of countless emaciated babies, just about to draw their last breaths.

Following that sharp encounter with the reality of the modern world into which we had so insouciantly embarked, I made it my business to see as much as I could of the areas in which the world’s poorest people live.  I not only lived for several months in an experimental Indian village, whose purpose was to uplift the lives of those many thousands living in surrounding villages, where I got my real lesson in what it is to be one of the world’s poorest people, but later in life I had the chance to visit  a slum now regarded as one of the world’s worst places of human habitation, Kibera, on the outskirts of Nairobi, Kenya.  I also collaborated on making a National Film Board of Canada film about a Latin American favela, or shantytown, built across a hillside above the Ecuadorian capital, Quito, by a group of  impoverished squatters who, under the organizational leadership of a local .communist,  had moved in and begun to establish residence there. That film was really about the best strategies by which the wealth of the Western world might be put to best use in  aid of residents of shantyowns, which, it argued, would be best brought about by the money going directly to the residents, without passing through (usually corrupt) national governments on the way. Finally, I spent three months in 1978 helping with the shooting of a film about an agricultural  commune operating under the Chinese Communist system.

It was against this  limited contact with  the lives of the poorest people on each of the major continents that I drew some conclusions about the limits to what seems to be the western idea of freedom.

For example, how could one talk of freedom for people forced to live in an environment like that of Kibera, which, when I visited it in the mid-eighties, had an estimated population of up to half a million people, we were told, mostly migrants from the villages of east Africa, who found themselves living impoverished lives, with no social services available to them, under minimal forms of government, in a community that could not even organize how to pick up the garbage that was thrown so carelessly into the middle of the main street, a community markd by, in the words of one social worker I met there, “every social problem you might care to mention.”?  

All of these communities were among “the poorest of the poor” in this world. Each was trying to make some impact on its circumstances, but in only one of these was any real improvement in the lives of the residents easily discernable. That was in the Chinese Communist commune established on the North China plain among what one western geographer once described as “the greatest collection of agricultural communities on earth.”

In some six weeks of relentless questioning I gathered enough information about the circumstances of this commune to enable me to classify it as equally poor in income to those other poor communities I had or have since visited on other continents.  Yet this was the only place among them where every citizen had his or her own house built by the commune according to strict rules of communal help; the only place where everyone was employed, either in agriculture (by far the biggest industry), or in small sideline occupations requiring great tenacity and persistence to make them work at all; where every child was in school, with the prospect that any child showing any special talent of whatever kind could be whisked on to some special school for special training; where the general health of the community, based on the system of so-called barefoot doctors, each with six months of medical training,  appeared to be almost on a par with our own; and in which, this the crowning touch, they grew enough food to feed everyone of the 15,000 people who lived in the six villages (known as production brigades), scattered around the commune, with extra food available to sell to surrounding towns.

Within the possibilities usually open around the world to such impoverished communities this achievement was something truly exceptional. Although it was carried out by an authoritarian government which had its ciients under tight control, nevertheless in any accounting of the freedom of citizens to lead a productive life, it has always seemed to me that this Chinese system, as I saw it operating for myself, was superior to the fumbling efforts being made to deal with poverty in more-capitalist orientated societies, where, in fact, the state seemed to be actively working against the solution to poverty conditions, rather than actively working, as in China,  to reduce them.

Having come to understand the history and background to the nearly total destruction of Chinese land and life against which they were struggling, it seemed to me unlikely that the peasantry, the principal beneficiaries of what looked to me like such a successful agricultural effort, would ever permit the State to turn away from Communism. And it was certainly a surprise to discover later that in the very same year we made our film, 1978, the recently-elevated and restored power-behind-the-throne Deng Hsiao Ping, enunciated a whole new direction for the Chinese economy that has set them so firmly on the capitalist road, and with such spectacular results. Following the death of Mao, the Chinese leaders emerged from the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution vowing to espouse a programme Chou En Lai had outlined in 1975, called the Four Modernizations. This was the banner for the wholesale change in direction of the Chinese economy.

Although at that time, 1978,  China wseemed to be groaning with food, food growing in every square inch of land, food piled in huge hea ps on the city streets, food markets bulging with fresh vegetables and cereals, and a distribution system that seemed to share it out as far as one could tell, equally, later history suggests that  the surplus gained from this success was not enough to prompt a successful industrialization of the economy, and so it was concluded that the new direction must be followed, even if it meant abandonment of many of the proudest achievements of Chinese Communism, like the Iron Rice Bowl, guaranteed for every citizen and worker, and so on.

It appears thast most of the draconiasn restrictions on personal behaviour have been relaxed, and China has become almost the opposite of the caricature pedalled in previous times of a society attentive to everyone’s needs. The shorthand casricture I use is that in those days, in internationasl sports, they played by the slogan, ”friendship first, competition second,” and they really seemed to mean it,  whereas in our modern times they seem to be as desperate to win at any cost as are the athletes of every other country.

Whas I set out to say, I guess, is that considerations about freedom of individual expression are out of place in a society that lacks the simple qualities of freedom, such as adequate nourishment and education, secure shelter, devoted nurture, and a path forward towards personal and even deeper goals in life. With these achieved, as the uproar in Hong Kong seems to indicate, new goals lie ahead that have to be fought for.  We should never forget that right now many hundreds of thousands of Chinese students are studying in the West --- 144,000 of them in Canada at last count ---  hoping to bring back with them the best knowledge available in the modern world.

Some reflections on Western attitudes to freedom of expression; every achievement in life depends on a full belly to begin with; we have a great deal to learn from what is happening around the world right now

I have  been reading through reports of political and social opinions  in Europe that have been sampled over the last few decades by Pew Research.

“Most Poles, Czechs and Lithuanians, and more than 40% of Hungarians and Slovaks, for example, said they felt most people in their countries were better off than 30 years ago; in Russia, Ukraine and Bulgaria, more than half felt things were worse.

“Asked how they felt their countries had advanced, central and eastern Europeans were most positive about education (65%), living standards (61%) and national pride (58%). They were less happy about about law and order (44%) and family values (41%), and a majority (53%) said healthcare had got worse in the post-communist era.”

I have been trying to reconcile these views against what I have always understood to be the prevailing Western viewpoint about Communism, whether in Europe, China or Latin America, which to summarize, held that “people are in chains, freedom of expression does not exist, political expression is confined to one-party, and law and order is conducted arbitrarily against anyone who expresses dissent from the prevailing orthodoxy.”  A description of hell on earth.

Although I never lived in an authoritarian one-party state, I have always bowed to the opinion often expressed to me by my peers that in such a state I would very quickly have been whipped off to jail if I had ever tried to exercize the level of dissent that I have normally been able to express in Canada with no deletirous result on my ability to make a living.

I am not sure, however, that this is the last word to be said on this subject. I have always felt there is something excessive in the tenacity --- one might almost call it fanaticism --- with which the Western thought process has clung to the view that  freedom of individual expression is a quality that overrides all others.  One surprising Pew figure is that 56 per cent of Europeans delivered from authoritarian governments did not express their satisfaction with the freer system of law and order that they have now found themselves living under.

It has always seemed to me --- I guess ever since that day in 1951 when I first stood on the wharf in Bombay, having just been dumped into the biggest culture shock of my young life as I watched some officials pull the body of a dead man from the harbour, officials who, in response to my breathless inquiry as to what happened to him, merely shrugged and said, “He must have fallen in. Or jumped,” --- that poverty might be the greatest single influence on the exercise, or lack of it,  of human freedom. And that the India into which my wife and I subsequently plunged wide-eyed, and half-terrified by it all, where people had been killing each other only three years before in their millions because of their religious differences, that India had been transformed – the best estimate is of up to 15 million people displaced, between one and two miion people murdered --- into two nations in which hundreds of thousands of them were living under cardboard shelters on the city pavements, where, open for all to see, were the bodies of countless emaciated babies, just about to draw their last breaths.

Following that sharp encounter with the reality of the modern world into which we had so insouciantly embarked, I made it my business to see as much as I could of the areas in which the world’s poorest people live.  I not only lived for several months in an experimental Indian village, whose purpose was to uplift the lives of those many thousands living in surrounding villages, where I got my real lesson in what it is to be one of the world’s poorest people, but later in life I had the chance to visit  a slum now regarded as one of the world’s worst places of human habitation, Kibera, on the outskirts of Nairobi, Kenya.  I also collaborated on making a National Film Board of Canada film about a Latin American favela, or shantytown, built across a hillside above the Ecuadorian capital, Quito, by a group of  impoverished squatters who, under the organizational leadership of a local .communist,  had moved in and begun to establish residence there. That film was really about the best strategies by which the wealth of the Western world might be put to best use in  aid of residents of shantyowns, which, it argued, would be best brought about by the money going directly to the residents, without passing through (usually corrupt) national governments on the way. Finally, I spent three months in 1978 helping with the shooting of a film about an agricultural  commune operating under the Chinese Communist system.

It was against this  limited contact with  the lives of the poorest people on each of the major continents that I drew some conclusions about the limits to what seems to be the western idea of freedom.

For example, how could one talk of freedom for people forced to live in an environment like that of Kibera, which, when I visited it in the mid-eighties, had an estimated population of up to half a million people, we were told, mostly migrants from the villages of east Africa, who found themselves living impoverished lives, with no social services available to them, under minimal forms of government, in a community that could not even organize how to pick up the garbage that was thrown so carelessly into the middle of the main street, a community markd by, in the words of one social worker I met there, “every social problem you might care to mention.”?  

All of these communities were among “the poorest of the poor” in this world. Each was trying to make some impact on its circumstances, but in only one of these was any real improvement in the lives of the residents easily discernable. That was in the Chinese Communist commune established on the North China plain among what one western geographer once described as “the greatest collection of agricultural communities on earth.”

In some six weeks of relentless questioning I gathered enough information about the circumstances of this commune to enable me to classify it as equally poor in income to those other poor communities I had or have since visited on other continents.  Yet this was the only place among them where every citizen had his or her own house built by the commune according to strict rules of communal help; the only place where everyone was employed, either in agriculture (by far the biggest industry), or in small sideline occupations requiring great tenacity and persistence to make them work at all; where every child was in school, with the prospect that any child showing any special talent of whatever kind could be whisked on to some special school for special training; where the general health of the community, based on the system of so-called barefoot doctors, each with six months of medical training,  appeared to be almost on a par with our own; and in which, this the crowning touch, they grew enough food to feed everyone of the 15,000 people who lived in the six villages (known as production brigades), scattered around the commune, with extra food available to sell to surrounding towns.

Within the possibilities usually open around the world to such impoverished communities this achievement was something truly exceptional. Although it was carried out by an authoritarian government which had its ciients under tight control, nevertheless in any accounting of the freedom of citizens to lead a productive life, it has always seemed to me that this Chinese system, as I saw it operating for myself, was superior to the fumbling efforts being made to deal with poverty in more-capitalist orientated societies, where, in fact, the state seemed to be actively working against the solution to poverty conditions, rather than actively working, as in China,  to reduce them.

Having come to understand the history and background to the nearly total destruction of Chinese land and life against which they were struggling, it seemed to me unlikely that the peasantry, the principal beneficiaries of what looked to me like such a successful agricultural effort, would ever permit the State to turn away from Communism. And it was certainly a surprise to discover later that in the very same year we made our film, 1978, the recently-elevated and restored power-behind-the-throne Deng Hsiao Ping, enunciated a whole new direction for the Chinese economy that has set them so firmly on the capitalist road, and with such spectacular results. Following the death of Mao, the Chinese leaders emerged from the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution vowing to espouse a programme Chou En Lai had outlined in 1975, called the Four Modernizations. This was the banner for the wholesale change in direction of the Chinese economy.

Although at that time, 1978,  China wseemed to be groaning with food, food growing in every square inch of land, food piled in huge hea ps on the city streets, food markets bulging with fresh vegetables and cereals, and a distribution system that seemed to share it out as far as one could tell, equally, later history suggests that  the surplus gained from this success was not enough to prompt a successful industrialization of the economy, and so it was concluded that the new direction must be followed, even if it meant abandonment of many of the proudest achievements of Chinese Communism, like the Iron Rice Bowl, guaranteed for every citizen and worker, and so on.

It appears thast most of the draconiasn restrictions on personal behaviour have been relaxed, and China has become almost the opposite of the caricature pedalled in previous times of a society attentive to everyone’s needs. The shorthand casricture I use is that in those days, in internationasl sports, they played by the slogan, ”friendship first, competition second,” and they really seemed to mean it,  whereas in our modern times they seem to be as desperate to win at any cost as are the athletes of every other country.

Whas I set out to say, I guess, is that considerations about freedom of individual expression are out of place in a society that lacks the simple qualities of freedom, such as adequate nourishment and education, secure shelter, devoted nurture, and a path forward towards personal and even deeper goals in life. With these achieved, as the uproar in Hong Kong seems to indicate, new goals lie ahead that have to be fought for.  We should never forget that right now many hundreds of thousands of Chinese students are studying in the West --- 144,000 of them in Canada at last count ---  hoping to bring back with them the best knowledge available in the modern world.