Mr. Speaker, I too am pleased to rise to speak on Motion No. 75. I wish to commend my hon. colleague from Kamloops for having brought this motion before the House even though I disagree with it in principle and will vote against it.
I think history is important. It is important for us to not dismiss issues such as this and the question of the legitimate status as veterans for those who fought in the MacKenzie-Papineau Battalion.
I will take a slightly different perspective from that which prevailed in this debate. It has been suggested that those 1,300 Canadians who entered into the Spanish civil war of their own volition did so out of a commitment to democracy and out of a desire to fight and defeat fascism.
I have no doubt that they felt so motivated, that they felt called and they felt the courage of their convictions in engaging in this war. Nor do I deny that many of these veterans acted heroically in the action they faced. The fact that so many of them died is one of the tragedies of war which we all mourn.
Several people who have spoken to this motion have rendered a simplistic and incomplete picture of the history of 1937 and the Spanish civil war. They have painted the contribution of the MacKenzie-Papineau Battalion and the Republican forces in the Spanish civil war as being, without question, beyond repute and on the side of the angels. They have suggested that the forces they were fighting were merely an extension of the unquestionably evil forces of fascism which were then gaining force in Nazi Germany.
I think it is important for us to recognize that when this House and this Parliament gave passage to the Foreign Enlistment Act in in 1937 it understood the greater complexity of the situation as it then unfolded in Spain, as did the Canadians who left to fight in Spain on behalf of the Phalangist cause.
No argument can be made that there was a unanimous view in this country about which side in this very complex and messy war had the moral upper hand.
I believe it was the hon. member for Laval West who said that the Foreign Enlistment Act, which prohibited Canadians from enlisting in a foreign war which was not recognized by this country, was passed in part under pressure from a fascist constituency in the Canadian electorate. I really think that does a disservice to Canadians, now and at the time. It does a disservice to our history. It is based on a gross misunderstanding of the reasons for this enactment.
The reality is the Spanish civil war was not a battle between good and evil. The Spanish civil war was a complex war between, on the one hand Republican forces which included communists, Stalinists, Trotskyites, anarchists and, admittedly, democrats. It was a strange and tempestuous coalition which itself came to blows internally. In fact, some of the most brutal actions in the Spanish civil war, as any historian will say, were within the republican movement itself, as the communists and Stalinists, fed by the tyrannical designs of the Russian Stalinists, attempted to seize control of the Republican movement and were largely successful in so doing.
On the other side, it was not simply a uni-dimensional coalition of fascists supported and motivated by Adolf Hitler. Indeed the German and Italian fascists supported elements of the Phalangist cause, but there were democrats, monarchists, catholics and others who opposed the Republican cause because they saw it as an encroachment of a foreign tyrannical political movement, communism, and its threatened imposition on Spain.
The reasons different people were motivated to take different sides in this war are complex. We do a great disservice to history and to those Canadians who fought on both sides of this war to suggest that it was as simple as has been presented here.
In fact, we have heard from many speakers about the atrocities committed by the Franco forces in the Spanish civil war, and understandably so. One can make no moral apology for the evil that was done in that respect.
However, it is important to enter into the record some historical consideration of the kinds of terrible evils perpetrated by the Republican cause which was supported by the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion. I do not suggest for one moment that the Canadian combatants in that war were engaged in these kinds of atrocities, but the fact is they fought alongside Stalinists and Trotskyites and anarchists and others who were motivated as much by a kind of anti-Christian and anti-catholic hatred as by a desire to establish democracy in Spain.
The eminent historian Hugh Thomas in his book the Spanish Civil War published in 1961, somebody regarded as generally a pro-Republican historian, detailed in his book the kinds of atrocities committed by the Republicans during the war. Among other things, he says that of the 86,000 people killed under the Republic, 7,900 were clergy or religious, 12 were Bishops, 283 were nuns, 5,200 were priests, 2,500 were monks and 250 were novices. These were not people killed as innocents in the war. These were religious people, not direct combatants in the war, who were sough out and killed by Republican forces.
He reports that nuns were raped and murdered in Pozuelo de Alarcon near Madrid. He reports of parish priests being seized by leftist militia men, scourged, tied to wooden beams, given vinegar to drink, crowned with thorns and then shot. He reports a crucifix was forced down the throat of a mother of two Jesuits. He reports that 800 faithful Christians were thrown down a mine shaft. He reports that in Cernera rosary beads were forced into monks' ears until their ears ruptured. The historical record shows priests having been castrated and their castrated organs being forced into their mouths. He reports priests who were burned alive.
These are all documented incidents. Faithful Christians were burned alive after digging their own graves. Others were burned or had their eyes gouged out. Churches and convents were indiscriminately sacked and burned. There were 150 churches totally destroyed and nearly 2,000 more than half destroyed.
That is just one small historical review of the record of the wonderful Republicans in the Spanish civil war.
I submit that in considering this bill and in considering the history of the passage of the Foreign Enlistment Act, which this motion essentially seeks to undo retroactively, we must be mindful of the historical complexities of the time and must not allow ourselves to be the victims of the kind of historical revisionism which suggests that one side in this combat was all sweetness and light. That is not what the record shows.
Because Parliament still recognizes the Foreign Enlistment Act some have argued that we cannot and should not extend veterans benefits to the remaining surviving Mac-Pap veterans. I would argue that if people engage in civil disobedience, as these people knowingly did, they agree to accept the consequences.
John Stuart Mill, the great political philosopher, says in his magnum opus On Liberty that those who engage in civil disobedience do so while accepting the sanctions the state imposes for such civil disobedience. Those who engaged in the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion knew full well at the time and with conscious deliberation decided to act with civil disobedience.
I suggest that 60 years later we cannot undo a decision they made at that time. I call on my colleagues to oppose this motion.