How quaint! Too bad he’s spying on you.
I’m no fan of the RCMP, one of our glorious national symbols. They had a historical role in abducting indigenous children from their families so that they could be tortured, brainwashed, and frequently killed in residential schools. More recently, they’ve been responsible for an out-of-control taser epidemic that has included the violent sexual assault of a young girl.
Occasionally, though, their role has been laughable as well as simply evil. Yesterday, for example, it came out that they spied on the Canadian feminist movement in the 1970s, apparently on the lookout for commie infiltrators.
Instead, they found Canadian musical icon Rita MacNeil.
Communist menace Rita MacNeil
This is particularly funny if your knowledge of MacNeil comes primarily from catching the odd Rita and Friends on CBC when you were a kid, but apparently she wrote a lot of “women’s lib songs” back in the day.
The article is a scream. Some choice quotes:
While the Mounties recognized the groups were out to “stop so-called exploitation of women,” as one officer put it, the force was much more concerned about the apparent infiltration of the movement by avowed Communist interests.
So-called.
The memo on the Winnipeg conference describes one session as “consisting of about 100 sweating, uncombed women standing around in the middle of the floor with their arms around each other crying sisterhood and dancing.”
I am really glad it wasn’t my tax dollars paying for Mounties to go see Rita MacNeil in concert.
The Mounties, used to keeping tabs on organizations run by men, didn’t know quite what to make of the long-haired women in scruffy blue jeans.
“They were at a loss to understand their strategies, their goals, their tactics,” said Sethna, who teaches at the University of Ottawa.
Blue jeans, as we know, are a feminist and lesbian uniform.
Anyway, my country is apparently laughing its collective ass off today, but I hope some people will pause in their well-earned giggles and see the reflection of this absurd “intelligence gathering” in the present day War on Terror.
It does not surprise me in the least the Rita MacNeil would be on a watch list. She grew up into a downhome music success, sure, but she wrote at least one amazing working-class anthem. She’s also been out there, fat and unapologetic, doing her thing, singing songs that pull on people’s hearts and speak to their experiences, and just plain glowing when she performs, forever.
In fact, she was being unashamed of her person or experiences in country music long before k.d. lang made it cool, but for some reason, Rita MacNeil’s name never comes up when we think of radical women musicians. It’s not just a generational thing—the same people who don’t know from Rita MacNeil have heard of, say, Johnny Cash, and are familiar with his political songs.
Kind of makes me think of Gerda Lerner’s comments in The Creation of Feminist Consciousness, about how women’s knowledge has historically been lost to subsequent generations,* so that women thinkers wound up unable to metaphorically stand on the shoulders of giants who had gone before, but instead had always to reason their feminist thoughts from first principles. k.d. lang, who is admittedly awesome, was hailed as this amazing, unashamed musician for doing her thing, and Rita MacNeil is relegated to vague memories of a CBC television special.
* Because women lacked access to education and therefore the means to record their knowledge and thoughts, because those few women who have been able to write haven’t addressed topics that the predominantly male custodians of knowledge deemed important enough to preserve, because women were kept isolated from each other and out of colleges and libraries so that they were unable to discover what other women were thinking and writing, and because women’s role, as defined by men, didn’t allow them a lot of leisure for thinking)
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That Henry Makow link is the best thing I’ve ever read.
and:
Really, it’s just awesome. I’m sorry I ever wore a skirt.
Lady Lydia likes him too.
There’s a lot to admire about the RCMP. This is not it.
Damn, I’m disappointed in the Mounties today.
I am actually amused by this. Canada portrays itself to the world as an advanced nation, free of bigotry that plagues other countries…Guess we have dirty laundry eh? It was always there we are just really quite about it so that we can claim denial.
I’m not immune to the romanticized view of the Mounties–after all, they are a national symbol and everything. (Mind you, the first thing I heard from real Canadian policemen when I met some on a field trip in gradeschool was that only the cadets and first-year officers actually still wear the iconic red uniforms day-to-day these days.)
But you know where I first heard of abuse by police? That’s right, in British Columbia, by Mounties….
*sighs* Yeah, Canada has its own issues. Maybe occasionally they’re a bit different from our southern neighbours (we hate on First Nations and East Indians more than Black people! so advanced!!), but we’re still screwed up like all the other humans on this planet.
Perhaps I should look up Rita MacNeil on YouTube.
This RCMP “intelligence” work is not a revelation. That they spied on millions of progressive Canadians in the 50′s, 60′s, 70′s much like the Stasi of East Germany has been well known for many years. Trade Unions, Peace Organizations, Student Organizations and yes, Womens’ rights organizations were targeted…probably MORE than organized crime, including the corporate criminals who got away. CSIS now plays a big role in this covert monitoring of millions of progressive Canadians. It is happening as we speak and the Tories just passed legislation giving them even more powers to spy on us all…we have less privacy rights….scary…