We publish some extracts of the booklet From Nationalism to Internationalism with regard to crisis of October, 70.

Let us remind that there were demonstrations against the War Measures Act of October, 70 in Toronto, Vancouver and even in London in front of the Canadian embassy. It is hidden at the same time by the Canadian and Quebecois nationalists.

Internationalist Communists – Klasbatalo

… Minority armed actions and terrorism play into the political games of the bourgeoisie no matter who uses them. Thus the FLQ action enabled a bourgeois party like the PQ to set itself up as peaceful defender of established institutions of one section of the State or another in order to intensify its repression against those who had nothing to do with the FLQ. The FLQ action, though it had several workers in its midst, reflected not even a glimmer of revolutionary class consciuosness, but rather a workerist populism. The fact that FLQ members had been able to train in Algerian and Jordan camps showed that they were were an unwitting puppet of inter-imperialist contradictions. The media hypocritically denounced FLQ violence. They forgot and still forget very easily the great number of workers killed or wounded in the workplace. According to data gathered by the Association of Workers’ Compensation Boards of Canada, 1055 deaths were linked to reported cases of accidents in the Canadian workplace in 2007, which is a 50% increase compared with 1996, a year in which 703 deaths were recorded…

In August 1970, back in Montreal, I was working as a chemical technician. That month, I met the Rose brothers and Francis Simard. While it was clear that they weren’t actually members of the FLQ, they were very close. We were strongly at odds over the terrorist action, which in theory took the side of the proletariat, obviously without going into any technical detail, particularly on the subject of kidnappings. I kept in mind that the kidnappings, would accomplish nothing and that in any case they would be replaced by more of the same or worse… We parted on this fundamental debate for the working class: international workers revolution or bourgeois actions, terrorism and kidnapping…

October 1970 Crisis

On October 5th, James Richard Cross, British diplomat, was kidnapped.

October 8th, over the air broadcast of the FLQ manifesto.

October 10th, the government of Robert Bourassa refused all negotiantion.

An hour later, in St-Lambert, Pierre Laporte was kidnapped by members of the Chénier cell, the Rose brothers, Francis Simard and Bernard Lortie.

The latest of the FLQ’s demands included the reading of the manifesto and the reinstatement of 66 workers from Lapalme who were still fighting to get their jobs back. This involved 450 truckers from Lapalm, a private company from which the federal governement had withdrawn a significant postal transport contract. These were workers who had been ruthlessly laid off by the federal government without compensation. The liberation of political prisoners had been abandoned. But these new demands were still too much for the State.

In the evening of October 15th, the army in the streets, the Quebec government rejected the conditions of the FLQ and offered the conditional liberation of five political prisoners, while allowing the abductors to leave the country. Bourassa called upon Ottawa to invoke the War Measures Act. The next day, for the first time in Canada, Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau, declared the War Measures Act in peace-time. These two kidnappings provided the State with the excuse to arrest almost five hundred people.

I was still active, as a Maoist, in Sherbrooke to help with the publication of L’Estrien Rouge.

Thursday, October 15th, while passing out leaflets denouncing the arrests, we’re arrested on autoroute 10 of L’Estrie. The police search the engine, the suitcase… our leaflets are on the back seat. The cops don’t see them. We’re allowed through and continue on our way to Sherbrooke.

That evening at the Paul-Sauvé Center an assembly of 3000 nationalists supported the FLQ’s manifesto.

October 17th, police recovered the body of Pierre Laporte.

October 18th, we had leaflets left over, and as I hated to waste anything, we headed back to Sherbrooke. We went there as two couples – my partner and I and another couple. We made it to Sherbrooke, taking minor roads as the highways were watched more closely.

We hand out our leaflets at U of Sherbrooke’s student residence. At the last room, we’re apprehended by plainclothes police. We’re arrested, and we ask the cops what would happen to our partners. The cops assure us they have nothing against them, that they are free to go.

Three weeks later, still in jail, I find out that half an hour after our arrest, our partners had been arrested while waiting in the car for us. We were sent to the Sherbrooke jail, the women to Tanguay prison in Montreal. In Sherbrooke, they forcibly fingerprinted me after twelve attempts and then sent us to Parthenais Prison in Montreal for three days. To show how scared they were of us, I was handcuffed and shackled (something usually reserved for the most dangerous criminals) with Lori Rice for the entire trip from Sherbrooke to Montreal. After three days in Parthenais, they sent us back to Sherbrooke.

For three whole weeks, no radio, no TV, no newspapers, no contact with lawyers or our parents. The War Measures Act allowed for three weeks of this. We were also kept completely isolated from ordinary prisoners. There were about ten arrested with us in the Sherbrooke region. Each day, some were released. After three weeks, I found myself alone with Mo.

As for the people who had been arrested, to give an idea of the extreme measures taken by the state during this “crisis”, among us was this Québécois just back from the United States, who’d just happened to stop in a provinicial restaurant, and then burst out laughing at an article in Journal de Montréal about the death of Laporte. A policeman eating in the same restaurant, managed to overhear this, found it kind of fishy and decided to arrest the guy. It took ten days in jail to find this funny. He wasn’t politicized at all. After three weeks, my anglophone comrade, Lori Rice, was immediately deported to the UK. As for us, Mo and I, we appeared in court every week, but the case was remanded each time. We had been accused of being sympathisers with the FLQ, which was absolutely false.

My parents had gotten this real scoundrel of a lawyer, a rat bag who prided himself on having studied with Jérôme Choquette, Quebec’s Justice Minister. The same Jérôme Choquette who personally opposed granting us bail.

In November, James Cross’s kidnappers were captured. The Castro regime agreed at the time to take them. A few years later, they managed to find refuge in France.

We wanted out of jail. Young and naïve, we decided then to wage a hunger strike to make ourselves heard, while calling on political prisoners of Parthenais to join us, though they refused. We, the two couples, decided stubbornly to go ahead anyway, and embarked on a two-week hunger strike, satisfying ourselves with just water or tea. Of course, we accomplished nothing but the loss of a few pounds. In fact, they threatened to send us to Montreal if we kept it up. And yet we knew of another political prisoner who had staged a hunger strike for forty days only to have tube feeding forced on him. So we dropped the hunger strike.

In December, the other political prisoners finally decided to wage a hunger strike. We’d decided against another attempt, but our two partners decided to give it another shot. The hunger strike ended on Christmas Eve. Again, this pressure tactic accomplished nothing.

The Rose brothers and Francis Simard were arrested December 28th in a hole that they’d dug under the furnace in the basement of Michel Viger’s country home.

Reading Francis Simard’s book, I learned that before they gave themselves up they had negotiated the release of several political detainees who were still imprisoned. Clearly our bail had depended entirely on the capture of Simard and the Rose brothers. So we were out the following day, December 29th.

Subsequently, in May of ’71, they attempted once more to try us all together, the two couples. However, we finally succeeded in getting the trials separated and I was the one selected to appear first. Since I was in jail for another political action that I’ll talk about later, it was Mo, then, who appeared ahead of the other three. Mo asked to go before a jury. We’d all been accused of aiding, supporting, and belonging to the FLQ, which was completely false. We were Maoist sympathizers, and the two women… they’d just had the bad luck of being our mates. The jury acquitted Mo, and once the verdict was reached, some of them even came over to shake my comrade’s hand, right under the judge’s nose. The point the defense had relied upon was that the right to pass out leaflets to inform the public represented a democratic right…

This mindless activism of the ‘60s [and the beginning of the ‘70s] - agitating for the sake of "doing something" is typical of anarchists or revolutionary activists. Through these actions, the experience of revolutionary working class struggle is rejected and outright caricatured. Illustrative of this crass ignorance of Marxism is the following quotation from the book by Francis Simard Pour en finir avec octobre: "We were against the theoretical squabbling over a comma or a phrase from The critique of the Gotha Program by Marx."

This contempt for the proletariat’s practical accomplishments led militants of the ‘60s to political death and to passivity. Many anarchists early in this new millenium found themselves in the same boat. They reminded me of chickens on farm, destined for the pot, running around with their heads cut off. Activists, just like certain anarchists, threw themselves into all kinds of activities or demonstrations without taking stock of their actions. This was the case throughout the ‘60s and even into the 21st century with regular demonstrations against economic summits rallying less and less people/participants. An international revolutionary party, a "head", they apparently no use for, as they throw themselves into action this way and that, squarely into reformism’s cauldron over and over, repeating the same mistakes…

You can order the booklet for 7 dollars (cash or cheque to Réal Jodoin) by writing to: CIM_ICM, C.P. 55514, Succ. Maisonneuve, Montréal, (QC) H1W 0A1

Available at the Bookshop l’Insoumise, 2033 St-Laurent, Montreal.

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