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China, Canada, Norman Bethune

5K views 22 replies 7 participants last post by  screature 
#1 ·
How China led Canada to Norman Bethune's "shrine"



In October 1939, while tending to the wounded on the front lines with the communist Chinese army, Norman Bethune cut his finger. Blood poisoning set in. He correctly diagnosed that he would die.

As John Allemang reported Wednesday, a new visitors’ centre has opened beside the Bethune Memorial House in Gravenhurst, Ont., to honour the famous Canadian surgeon and humanitarian. And therein lies a tale that deserves to be told again.
Today, 15,000 people traipse through the Bethune Memorial House every year and now they will be able to enjoy a spanking new visitors’ centre to boot. Bethune’s communist taint has long since been rinsed away; modern biographers appear more interested in his relentless womanizing. (He married and divorced the same wife twice, which was quite a feat back then.)
The calculation is as simple now as it was back in the Seventies. The Chinese honour Bethune; Canada wants closer relations with China; Canada honours Bethune.
(The Globe and Mail)
 
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#5 ·
If Bethune had not saved these Maoist soldiers, they would not have been so effective in cleansing the Chinese countryside of vermin.

Put up a statue to Donald Sutherland instead.
 
#8 ·
That statue should have been sold to the Chinese at a profit. It's a shame that the feds feel obliged to say anything about Bethune, but I think Clement is not out of line in stressing historical significance, while holding a harder line on Bethune's legacy.
 
#12 ·
The continuing story...

Dumb as dirt: Bethune, Mao, Anders and the new McCarthyism

A former Reform Party MP, Rob Anders is well-known to Canadians for a variety of missteps, gaffes, and controversies. He began is political career as a professional heckler for the Republican Party in the United States which earned him the sobriquet of "a foreign political saboteur" from CNN. Anders was the sole parliamentarian to vote against making Nelson Mandela an honorary citizen of Canada in 2001. His campaign for the Wildrose Party of Alberta against Premier Alison Redford's Progressive Conservatives generated controversy, as has his lobbying to cut off government funding for the CBC, and his removal from the House of Commons Standing Committee on Veterans Affairs, partly based on his tendency to fall asleep during meetings. Although nineteen members of Anders' Calgary West riding association resigned en masse, protesting interference from the Conservative Party, Anders enjoys the support of Prime Minister Stephen Harper who has said, "Rob is a true reformer and a true conservative. He has been a faithful supporter of mine and I am grateful for his work."
In 1935 Bethune joined the Communist Party of Canada (not China). He was not a "Maoist", indeed, he only met Mao once. Contrary to Anders' claims he was never a "propagandist for Mao" and there is no evidence that Bethune "lionized" Mao. Whatever Mao's faults -- and they were many -- during the two years (not three as Anders claims) when Bethune was in China (1938-1939) the Chinese communists were occupied with fighting an invasion by the Imperial forces of Japan and not with any internal repressions. Moreover, whatever Bethune's political convictions, his work in China was of a humanitarian nature as a physician (he once performed 115 operations in the space of 69 hours -- without sleep), not as a soldier, politician, or propagandist. By the time of Mao's Great Leap Forward in 1949, Bethune had already been dead for a decade. The attempt to tarnish Bethune with the brush of Mao Zedong's subsequent excesses is historically fallacious and absurd.
(Rabble.ca)
 
#13 ·
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