News

Naked we go

By Kevin Steel ⋅ October 31, 2007 ⋅  Email this post ⋅  Print this post ⋅ Post a comment

Today being Halloween, I thought I would post something scary, which is why you find the frightening picture on the site beside these words. The image is of a nude woman, twenty-something or older, a mother-type, cellulite on her legs and buttocks, glasses on and her hair pinned back primly to contrast with her nakedness, calmly holding up her clothing before a burning building. In the brightness of daylight, the hellish flames in front of her are all visible, giving us an instant sense of the intensity of the fire.

The building is her house. She is preparing to throw her clothes onto the fire.

As a child, this picture made me afraid when I came across it in the basement of our home. And I still find it very disturbing. It’s news photo, real life, not a still from some horror-slash-slasher movie that evokes the cheese ball chills of the titillated teenager on Halloween. Here we have fire, uncontrolled fire, and we have flesh, exposed, controlled—mom, home, undone, burning. It made no sense.

The photograph appears on the cover of the book “Terror in the name of God” by Simma Holt, copyright 1964. I’ve scanned the front of the second paperback printing, 1967, by McClelland and Stewart Limited. Up at the top of the cover you’ll see it’s from “The Canadian Best-Seller Library” and cost 95 cents new. This year marks the 40th anniversary of that printing. My copy doesn’t contain photo credits, but by the author’s acknowledgements at the back, it’s a safe bet the cover photo and most of the pictures in the middle are from the Vancouver Sun archives and probably date from 1944. Here are few more photos of the protests from inside the book .



Holt, then a journalist with the Vancouver Sun, wrote Terror in the name of God after exhaustive research into the Sons of Freedom, a radical off-shoot of the Doukhobors, immigrants from Russia who sought religious freedom and land in Saskatchewan and south central British Columbia. The Doukhobors, btw, represent Canada’s tie to author Leo Tolstoy, who raised money for their emigration.

The Sons of Freedom and their followers would burn their houses and all their possessions, including their clothing, to protest government intrusion into their way of life—most often over the state’s insistence that their children attend school. The Sons of Freedom were also terrorists, responsible for bombing railways, post and telegraph offices. Simma contends in her book they evolved into a criminal organization.

By recalling these events, I merely remind myself that Canada has had long experience dealing with domestic terrorists. As I consider the Air India Inquiry, now ongoing, and the concern over domestic terrorists, I wonder how much we learned as a nation from the experience of dealing with the Sons of Freedom over those 50 years.

My answer to my own question is simple. Not much. Near the root of the trouble with the Sons of Freedom there was a successful assassination, a terrorist bombing, on Canadian soil targeting Canadians, which remains unsolved to this day. Should we dwell on our failures? Of course. There is probably much to learn from failing. The Air India Inquiry is attempting to illustrate that very point.

Peter Verigin

The assassination I speak of occurred in 1924, on October 28. It happened about 4 hours drive from where I now live. You can find a great deal of info about this railway bombing and the death of the Doukhobor leader Peter Verigin (or Peter Lordly as his followers called him) on the Canadian Mysteries site: Explosion on the Kettle Valley Line: The Death of Peter Verigin. An interesting side note of contemporary relevance; one of the suspects named on the Canadian Mystery sites is the Liberal Party of BC because they benefited from the bombing. A newly elected Conservative MLA was killed in the blast, after an election (June 20, 1924) during a period of minority government, thereby enabling the Liberals to hold onto power. And of course we have a Liberal government provincially in power today. This conspiracy theory is the kind of speculation that runs rampant in unsolved cases. Myself, I stick to the original suspects; those who had means, motive and opportunity, (with opportunity being their main “advantage” over other suspects), the Doukhobor factions, who would have had intimate knowledge of Verigin’s travel plans, not to mention the fact that they demonstrated as time worn on after the bombing their willingness to employ similar methods.