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- Newsgroups: can.politics
- Path: sparky!uunet!utcsri!cs.ubc.ca!newsserver.sfu.ca!sfu.ca!schuck
- From: schuck@fraser.sfu.ca (Bruce Jonathan Schuck)
- Subject: Re: Senate Interrogation
- Message-ID: <schuck.721871938@sfu.ca>
- Sender: news@sfu.ca
- Reply-To: Bruce_Schuck@sfu.ca
- Organization: Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, B.C., Canada
- References: <17510@mindlink.bc.ca>
- Distribution: can
- Date: Sun, 15 Nov 1992 23:58:58 GMT
- Lines: 51
-
- Crawford_Kilian@mindlink.bc.ca (Crawford Kilian) writes:
-
- >It might even be that the Senate had a point, but when I heard John Sylvain
- >(PC-Quebec, appointed 1990, thank you very much Brian) distort Brian
- >McKenna's college-paper editorials from the 1960s, I knew we were dealing
- >with good old-fashioned repression like Joe McCarthy used to make.
-
- You mean that distortion by politicians is evidence of McCarthyite
- repression? Thats a gross exageration isn't it?
- What about distortion by documentry film-makers. Whats that evidence of?
-
- >We'll probably never know (even if we were there) what really happened in the
- >skies of Germany 50 years ago, and whether it meant a damn thing. But we
- >ought to know that freedom of expression is under immediate threat from
- >tax-paid Senators like Sylvain. And we ought to be yelling our heads off
- >about that, not about Gwynne bloody Dwyer's credibility.
-
- I think the lack of rebuttal time by the CBC is a more important issue.
- It's much easier to distort history 50 years later and get away with
- it. Memories are dim, many of the participants are dead and can't
- defend themselves. As a government agency, the CBC *should* have been
- prepared to give time to veterans groups to counter McKennas new
- version of history. Hell, they didn't even have to give them any
- money. All they had to do was give them 15-30 minutes after each show
- to debate the issues with McKenna or someone who agrees with him. IS
- that too much to ask?
-
- The term freedom of expression gets thrown around a lot, but freedom
- of expression isn't being challenged here. It`s freedom of government
- subsidized expression thats being challenged. Nobody is trying to take
- away the McKennas right to rewrite history in their revisionist image.
- The Senators [maybe] are threatening the McKennas government funding for
- revisionism.
-
- Such state subsidized revisionism is not guaranteed in the Charter of
- Rights. Nobody is guaranteed a million dollar budget and three hours
- of prime time to rewrite history.
-
- I know the Senators are still pissed off over the shabby treatment of
- Billy Bishop in the 1980 documentry that used Eric Pederson portraying
- a British mechanic and claimed Bishop had lied about attacking a
- German aerodrome. There was no evidence presented in that "documentry"
- that substantiated such revisionism. It was just another
- unsubtantiated attack on a true Canadian war hero. The NFB likes to do
- that kind of stuff, and the V & H was just a continuation of that
- attitude of tearing down people who aren't around to defend
- themselves.
-
- --
- ......
-
-