In early 1962, my last term of high school, I bought a collegiate songbook. One number amused me greatly. The Bomb Song was a spoof on anarchists around the time of the First World War. Apart from a prescient added modern reference to blowing up an airport, the song seemed quaintly dated. But within a year, political bombings staged a comeback in Canada. In March 1963 the newly-formed Front de libération du Québec, the infamous FLQ, began a ferocious campaign. In April the first death occurred, a night watchman at a military recruiting centre in Montreal. The next month a soldier was maimed for life by a mailbox bomb he was attempting to disarm. This was the start of what became a recurring cycle in Quebec: assorted terrorist attacks, occasional deaths or injuries, then a period of calm following arrests and convictions.
Over the next seven years most Canadians became inured to successive waves of Quebec separatist bombings. The potential of the threat became more immediate for me on Wednesday, June 24, 1970. That morning I was jogging near my Ottawa apartment building when I heard a loud, sharp bang. My army training had accustomed me to the sound of high explosives detonating. Clearly this was something out of the ordinary in the capital. Later that morning, arriving at my National Defence Headquarters jobsite six kilometres away, I learned that the complex had been blasted by a bomb. A 50-year-old woman working there had been killed. Credit for the deed was claimed by the FLQ. To the best of my knowledge no one was ever charged or convicted for the killing.
The following October the FLQ escalated the stakes with political kidnappings. The government’s response brought on murder then the government further ratcheted up its response and crushed the FLQ.
Although thereafter Quebec separation became a matter for the ballot box, terrorism in Canada did not end. As instances, there were the early 1980s depredations of the anarchy-oriented Squamish Five, so dubbed from the vicinity of their arrest, and the Air India bombing in 1985. More recently, in the wake of the hijacked airliner attacks of Sept, 11, 2001 and the recent bomb explosions at the Boston Marathon, we have come to a heightened perception of menace from a worldwide epidemic of terrorist orientation.
Mass killings by disgruntled individuals are a parallel development in recent times. Anger at the loss of a job, failure to obtain tenure, the breakup of a romance – any number of things can generate anger or despondency which somehow prompts them to stalk into a school, a restaurant, a workplace – any place where there are people – and begin slaying. Other motivations may be more complex, including the deranged persons whose sick minds become obsessed with multiple slaying. I recall nothing like all this in my youth, and my impression is that, at least in North America, it is mainly a phenomenon of the last quarter century.
The terrorists often proclaim complex rationales in an attempt at justification while the non-political mass killers are prone to woolly explanations of their sense of grievance if they choose to say anything. But these people share one characteristic in addition to their lethality – a contemptible obliviousness or indifference to the fact that their victims are human beings entitled to live. They are cocooned in their own thinking, more often than not buttressed by a sense of their own importance.
Writer David Haas is a long term St. Albert resident.
