[EFC#3] Not all different roads are better

This is the introduction to, and the third installment of, segments of ESCAPE FROM CERTAINTY: MY SAFE PASSAGE THROUGH THE ULTRA LEFT, A MEMOIR OF THE RADICAL 1970s AND 1980s. I will be “dropping” these into my substack periodically.

Some years back, in 2018, I attended a celebration of life for an old friend — a bus driver I had not seen in decades. We were communists together for a time. Three of us shared a townhouse for about a year in Hull (now, Gatineau) Quebec. There we housed the local Marxist-Leninist party library, and in the basement a Gestetner duplicator that was perpetually breaking down. To inspire us, we pasted a collage of newspaper photos of international revolutionary events on the walls surrounding our underground press. Lots of pictures of guns and flags and clenched fists in the air. We coated it all with shellac, creating a marvelous mural we would regret having to leave behind.

Photo: some of the old friends who attended Alain’s celebration of life in 2018, faces blurred to protect the innocent. Author, unblurred, is at “far left” so to speak.

Alain Charette, that OC Transpo bus driver, and I sometimes joked about what we’d do if we triumphed and overthrew the capitalist state, how the portfolios would be distributed, and who would get the Ministry of Agriculture. (He also had some nefarious plans for the overthrown big bourgeoisie, but no need to go into those details.)

I would bet now we never believed we’d seize the reins of power.

That was a long time ago. Since then, many countries have undergone revolutionary transformations driven by ideologies such as the Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist one we embraced. But in our case there was next to no chance of our mission being realized.

Notice of Alain’s death appeared both in the local paper and on national news because of an act of courage and kindness he performed a few years ago when supporting a niqab-wearing Muslim woman who was being verbally insulted on the city bus that he drove. I barely recognized his photo, it being so long since we’d met up; his hair was now white where he wasn’t bald, he’d put on weight; but his voice in a short news clip was familiar, and of course I recalled his name. Although we called him by a Party name, and not Alain.

A few obituaries made clear that he was still connected with The Party, although I’d speculate that aside from continuing to pay dues, he wasn’t particularly active. How could he be?

A dozen or so familiar faces were at Alain’s wake, which was to be expected. However, a few of us haven’t been connected for eons, so our own attendance was shocking for the continuing Party loyalists. Recognition took time in some cases, but then faces lit up.

We embraced. A wave of nostalgia resurfaced, in my case not for the doctrinaire political views that I’ve eschewed for decades now, but a comradeship –- more than just familiarity -- that survived. We’d done a lot of stuff together over my decade of radical political activism. Greetings were undeniably mutual, warm and authentic. No political conversions were going to happen. Aging comrades reconnected.

The next day, one thought that came to my mind was that if an authoritarian political Right were ever to arrive in this country, I could still count on these people to fight, side by side. As I wrote to a colleague, this confirmed my hope that idealism is never entirely misplaced or erased. We may not agree anymore on what we support, but we know something about what we agree to hate. He replied that sometimes our idealism is all that remains. Maybe it’s all that matters, too.

Idealism. This short memoir will try to answer a question that has plagued me for many years: How does an idealistic, progressive, anti-establishment individual, someone who opposes dictatorship and violence, end up supporting the worst possible kinds of dictatorship, conformity and killing? That individual in this case is me, but it could be one of thousands of others in Canada, and millions elsewhere.

The answer to the question is more complicated than you’d think. Naivety, romanticism, burning hormones of male youth, ideological black-and-white thinking, limited exposure to history, brainwashing, “a stage”, and alienation? These can all be part of it. Supporting Maoism or Stalinism in Canada in the 1970s and 80s was a boutique political phenomenon even then, and more so now, but it was not unheard of, nor particularly rare. For decades, around the world, including outside of China and the Soviet Union, communism was even popular. War-time Stalin was our ally against Hitler and we even had a mountain named after him in Canada.

As interesting to me, now, is evaluating what was achieved by, and even positive about, going through the process of extremist belief, rejecting it, and surviving the vacuum that resulted.

Paradoxically, the “escape” from any cult-like political framework can partly be explained by the rediscovery of the original idealism that drove people like me into the movement in the first place, (and for me this was more than 50 years ago).

I am still faced with evaluating whether my time with the Marxist-Leninists was more productive than wasted time.

Retrospectively it’s easy and almost maudlin to say: Despite it all, I learned a lot that was later useful in life. But if this short memoir is to be meaningful in some way, I want it to be directed at young people who might be susceptible to the temptations I yielded to. And I’d want you to steer away from extremism, rather than retrospectively acquire insightful gems from your embrace of it.

It was easier and more acceptable to be uncritically friendly to Maoist revolution and a certain brand of anti-imperialism in the 1960s and 70s than it is now because of the then-active US war in Indochina, the race war in the US, what we knew about the Bay of Pigs, the heated-up Cold War nuclear arms race and American interference in Latin America. These were all big news stories of the time, and anyone the least bit political was following these events. Most of this bad policy was US-driven, we believed, which is why so much of our political enthusiasm was “anti-American”. Add to this the “anti-revisionist” (or pro-Stalinist) critique of the Soviets and you have a taste of why some youth (albeit a radical small minority) fell into the Maoist and Marxist-Leninist cage.

“Revisionism” as we saw it was a dilution of Marxist principles and contamination of the pure doctrine that fed our own rebellion. The leap to revolution from reform was also a matter of learning the right lesson from what happened in Chile after the overthrow of Salvador Allende. For me, the Allende debacle, although I knew not much more about it than the necessary minimum, was powerful proof that social-democracy and capitalist system reform were a dead end. Violent revolution was required because the enemy was vicious and would stop at nothing. The 1982 Costa-Gavras movie Missing (with Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek) would later help clarify and confirm this belief, too.

But was it a cult or a movement? One thing both have in common is radical rejectionism that becomes normalized within a cocoon of group dynamics. That’s also what makes exit-ing so traumatic. When some adherents escaped the Ultra Left, they became conservative, cynical, resentful, and hard-core anti-communists. But those like me retained our progressive tilt, often becoming more effective polemicists. I was with the Marxist-Leninists for about a decade, from the mid-1970s through the mid-1980s, but others were in far longer, and some I knew, like Alain, remained supporters of the movement until they died. Some still show up in different organizations and engage in other progressive (or dubious) projects. A few familiar people — old friends — still run in federal and provincial elections for the Marxist-Leninist Party.

It’s tempting for me to argue that their staying in the movement one minute longer than I did — or leaving one moment earlier — is incoherent. Such was said of quitters after the Hungarian uprising or Khrushchev’s revelations in 1956, the Prague Spring in 1968 or Tiananmen Square in 1989. But everyone travels a different road.

The impossibility of staying put, even if it took a nudge or two to disembark, was stronger for me than the loyalty that confronted (condemned) those who couldn’t leave. Loyalty is a difficult master. I know my philosophical impasse wasn’t the same as for others. Some found safety and comfort in the certainty of a Manichean world or in the merits of a great historical tradition. Choosing to embrace the revolution when I did was compelling, stimulating, exhilarating, even empowering — although insufficient. And ultimately impossible.

This memoir proceeds chronologically, beginning with a few reflections on my childhood and adolescence that suggest an early enthusiasm for adventure and espionage, not unlike the experience of many boys and young men. I’ve included some insights into being heart-broken in my teens, and on moving out at nineteen. A (mostly accurate) canoe-camping trip with three friends, and an earlier bicycle sojourn, may not seem at first to have much to do with political extremism – and that is why they are included.

Most extremists were (and in many ways remain) normal people that do mostly typical things. In this pursuit, as boys and young men, we take on heroic voyages and take customary risks to prove our mettle to ourselves and to our tribes. We rarely intend to put ourselves or others in danger. But then a switch is flipped, and the downward tumble begins.

I have chosen the straightforward subtitle of “A memoir of the radical 1970s and 1980s” to set the tone for this era. Another good option was: “My unsuccessful attempt to overthrow the bourgeoisie and install the dictatorship of the proletariat”. In the end, I thought too few would immediately grasp the self-rebuke or irony.

The biggest, imperfectly answered question in this reflection, which covers a significant part of my youth, is whether I regret my time in the Ultra Left such that I would have preferred that those years never happened. If I could, would I have avoided that passage, rather than eventually escaped from it?

My answer to this conundrum should be telling but, honestly, I am not sure. While I did what I did because of my circumstances and the enticements I faced, I am now hopeful I could have more usefully spent that decade differently if I’d read this memoir first.

There are many things that I regret (the things I did that were wrong; ten years that might have been spent doing other “peace work”; the careers and academics I might have engaged in and become successful at.) However, we don’t get to freely pick the choices we make when we are young. Or ever. I believe that in the precise conditions we enter, being the people we are at the time, young or old, we wouldn’t have and therefore couldn’t have done otherwise. In the Marxist materialist explanation: We do have choices, but they are never free. I don’t mean that in a predetermined religious sense, as we don’t live our lives that way; but I’m no free-willer.

Given different circumstances, better information, greater sophistication, a more secure young love life, a different personality type, I might have heeded an elderly ex-communist’s advice and never hooked up with an Ultra-Left movement. I hope I would still have engaged in many of the campaigns that have sustained me after my exodus, over the last forty years. I hope that I would have been as idealistic, but more clear-headed, more strategic. I think there is some evidence that this was possible.

But I learned a lot passing through certainty. Everything would have been different for me if I’d taken a different road, but that can be said for any of us, and not all different roads are better.

Ottawa, July 2025