A Long Summary Of Barbara Amiel's "Confessions," Part 2

[This summary is a continuation of the summarizing of the first ten chapters of her 1980/81 book, Confessions, which is long out of print and not easy to find. The first part of the summary is here.]


After the proposed film on Mao's China fell apart, she began to read the works of Marx, Engels and Lenin, deeply, and found that the horrors she had seen were the “fulfillment” (p. 111) of Communism. At the time she was doing so, as well as through the rest of the 1970s, the writings of “armchair socialists,” who were full of the spirit of blame externalization (p. 114,) were splayed all over the media. Reading their words brought the original texts to her memory. The key to classical liberalism, she concludes, is to assume, or realize, that the common good is “unknowable” (p. 117.) She then advocates that kind of liberalism, with the note that the price of a liberal society is the misuse of freedom, and imperfect justice. What differentiates democratic socialism and Communism, she continues, is the means of coercion they employ: the former group prefers to confine coercion to legislative, regulatory and court-imposed measures. This coercion is becoming less than fair for businesspeople, and for independent workers as well. She also notes that intent has to be proved for ordinary crimes, but not for what were called “hate crimes” at that time…or for speeding, for that matter (pp. 122-3.) She points to the same kind of servility she saw in Gertie emerging in Swedish professors, as of the late 1970s, a time when the professors there had to be appointed by the government. She also provides glimpses of the New Class emerging in Sweden at that time (pp. 123-5.) Ms. Amiel concludes that State dependency is addictive; the secret to socialism’s success is that it bestows license for the “laundered lie,” which Marxism calls “objective truth” (p. 127.)

In early 1973, she created a consumer-education game show for CTV News, and was amazed at the amount of obstructionism from its co-sponsor, the Department of Consumer and Corporate Affairs. The money she made from that show gained her some risk capital to go into freelance journalism, and she began spreading the anti-socialist message. She notes that socialism induces a “spiritual and moral bankruptcy,” which leads, in geopolitics, to picking on small bully-nations while appeasing the bigger bully-nations. (pp. 128-9.) And, she concludes that false and misleading words can hurt society in general, by warping public opinion.

After receiving a commission from Chatelaine in 1974 to write a story on women abusing UI, in which she pointed out that only a small minority do so, she heard her report criticized by a female NDP staffer for Stephen Lewis before it had been typeset. The story was killed, even though she got full payment for it. She discusses feminist history as mythology, noting that societies tend to be organized pragmatically, and observes that modern North American feminism sprung from “a primitive set of values” (p.137) required by early North Americans to survive. She does bring up the glass ceiling, still prevalent in the late 1970s, but she notes that pay discrimination, often done for keep-‘em-happy reasons as opposed to value-creation reasons, had a root in the Criminal Code of Canada. At the time she wrote Confessions, section 215 of the Criminal Code imposed obligations for a father, but not for a mother, to provide basic support for his spouse and kids. [This is no longer true.] The legitimate cause of pay equity, though, was being mixed demands for “parity” (p. 139) – group status as an employability constraint. Measures such as that one push society out of its natural, pragmatic rhythms and customs. She points to three issues which, according to her, the feminist movement shows wooden-headedness: divorce property settlements, abortion and work benefits. She concludes that the feminist movement is, basically, an attempt by middle-class women to get government help traditionally reserved for the poor. In her discussion on abortion, she discloses that she herself had one, at the age of twenty-four when employed by the CBC as a script assistant, because she was “in too much of a hurry with life” (p. 144.)

Left-liberalism is creating an Alice-in-Wonderland polity, she opines. The example she uses is the whipping-boy treatment accorded to South Africa in the late 1970s, for its apartheid policies. The white South Africans 'earned' it because they did not cover up the tyranny they were in charge of with soothing (if largely unimplemented) “guarantees,” which the Communist Party elites in the Soviet bloc did. She also points to foreign aid being sent without later check-ups on how the funds were used. Her explanation of why fascistic regimes were the whipping boys in the 1970s is that the same governments doing so were too slow to wake up when fascism was ascendant in the 1930s. Rising to the big geopolitical threat of the time tends to “scare the horses,” except when it becomes an imminent threat. She holds up the anti-development crusade in late 1970s Canada, done under the rubric of native rights, as an example of what could be called, though not by her, a combination of righteousness and certitude in a scaffolding of plain partisanship, with rhetoric and exciting factoids in place of logic and careful unearthing of the entire set of facts.

She next discusses Canadian multiculturalism, which she opines is an attempt to drain both Quebec nationalism and resistance amongst English-Canadians to the introduction of French in their area. There’s also a Liberal patronage motive. The trouble with multiculturalism, though, is that it relies upon ethnic interest groups, who may have substituted loudness for popularity. In education, when combined with egalitarianism, it encourages opinioneering in place of study and fact-based argument. It also encourages, and sometimes mandates, the sanitizing of textbooks through blotting out facts that go contrary to the narrative; multiculturalism also tends to push for presenting ideals as norms. Three professors from the University of Toronto, J.M. Beattie, J.M.S. Careless and M.R. Marrus publicly complained about the former in a letter to the Globe and Mail (p. 171.)

Mao’s China, and the resultant Great Wall of Apologism, is what occupied her next. In the early 1970s, the left-libs wouldn’t admit to any massacres resulting from the Cultural Revolution, at all. The dissident literature from China was ignored. There was no “younger her” to spill the truth about what life was like in Mao's China, so she wrote a column for Maclean’s, which was printed, asking for someone to do so. It prompted a lot of critical letters – one from an employee of the National Film Board of Canada.

One of the cases that galvanized Ms. Amiel to fight for freedom of even disagreeable speech was the student-activist harassment of Edward C. Banfield, a Harvard sociologist, in March 1974. He was going to give a formal speech at the University of Toronto; it was cancelled. Another whipping boy, whose public trashing took place as of the opening of the 1970s, was Arthur Jensen. Once again, the Canadian left-liberals showed an inclination towards “keeping up with the Panthers.” She also highlights two local-to-Toronto victims of mau-mau activism. Both were professionals, inclined to be liberal, whose work in their field was rigorous; the latter showed a creative flair in his profession.

Amiel’s first brush with a Human Rights Commission occurred when she was at Maclean’s, in 1977. She received, through editor-in-chief Peter Newman, a complaint about her being (of all things) anti-German, signed by the then-Chairperson of the Manitoba Human Rights Commission (p. 197-8.) Her stiff reply prompted a press release from the Commission, making the complaint public, which got her called a “racist” (p. 202.) As the squabble continued, the MHRC evinced a deal-with-the-boss sneakiness as it continued its “educational” quest; she was only made aware of the exchanges because Mr. Newman forwarding the MHRC letter to her, on his own initiative. Shortly after that incident, the Ontario Human Rights Commission began talking to Mr. Newman about her writings, which may have resulted from the original interest-group complainant contacting the OHRC on his own initiative. She garnered the impression that “human rights officers” tended to parrot the complaints made to them.

She began looking into the Commission's operation. One report she read in 1977, written by a staffer in the OHRC in response to a series of brutish attacks on East Indians in Toronto, contained the proto-politically correct notion that only whites could be racist (p. 220.) That report, which landed on the desk of then-Attorney-General Roy McMurtry, not only recommended the scrubbing of textbooks mentioned earlier, but also the adding of an enforcement bureau to the OHRC, which was also implemented. The author became the Commissioner of Race Relations soon afterwards.

She discovered plans to impose sensitivity training sessions for community-relations workers in the Ontario Housing Corporation (replaced by the Social Housing Services Corporation) around that same time. Affirmative action was, of course, recommended, but Amiel calls attention to a case where that the operator of a gay bar was rebuked for “discriminatory” hiring practices, for trying to hire a gay waiter for it (p. 228.) As she became known as a critic of the HRCs, she found herself being typecast as a stereotypical “conservative” by her fellow journalists, and even was expected to defend positions she did not agree with, such as the police’s supposed right to interfere with civil liberties (pp. 233-4.) The main part of the book ends with her reflecting on that luncheon talk she had had with the rabbi, who had married her and Mr. Jonas, in his role as an official of the Ontario HRC. (An excerpt from it indicates that he was exhorting, not scolding, her and her husband – p. 237.) She leaves us, pre-appendix, with the conclusion that left-liberals do not want central planning of the economy, but they do want central planning of mores. She ends with a reflection on the cost of such central planning, not only to the polity but also to plain, old-fashioned, more informal civility.


[The appendix itself is not included in this summary.]