“Mr. Arcand, Canada’s Own Mosley Thinks The Sun Wronged Him” By Adrien Arcand (1947)

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FOREWORD

Canada’s own Mosley Thinks The Sun Wronged Him by Adrien Arcand, Vancouver Sun, Letters to the Editor, 4 December 1947

Newspapers.com is double-dealing, and double-dipping.  I ran a search and was asked to pay to view the search results.  I chose the cheapest option presented, $7.95 USD for one month.  Newspapers.com happily took my money.  I then found 99% of the results on the results page blocked off, and a message popped up demanding an upgrade to see the items I had already paid to see.  Minimum charge of the so-called “Publisher Extra Upgrade”: $19.90 USD.  And this, IN ADDITION to the $7.95 USD already paid.  In other words, they’re the “Publisher” and I must fork over the “Extra”.  Total cost of one month to look at newspaper clippings:  $39.26 CAD.  I hope I have enough time this month to make the extortion worthwhile.

UPDATE.  I stand corrected.  Newspapers.com voluntarily notified me (without my asking) that “We have refunded the Basic charge of $7.95 to your card.  It will post to your account ending in 2477 in 3-5 business days.”  That brings the real cost for one month’s access to $19.90 USD or 27.85 CAD.  Still a pretty penny.

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

Mr. Arcand, Canada’s Own Mosley

Thinks The Sun Wronged Him

By Adrien Arcand

THE VANCOUVER SUN, DEC 4, 1947

Editor, The Sun:  Sir,— I have read with amazement and amusement your editorial of November 24, entitled “The Menace of Arcand,” because I still ignored that editorials could be based on inaccuracies, untruths, misinformation, distortion and propaganda platitudes in a daily paper claiming some importance.  When one has truth or complete knowledge, he has not to resort to such proceedings.  Here are some of your affirmations and the truth about them:

1.  I was leader of the Canadian Unity Party.  The so-called party, quite distinct from the National Unity Party on many grounds, existed only in a section of the Canadian West and Mrs. Dorise Nielsen was its representative in the House of Commons.

2.  The National Unity Party never had black shirts.

3.  I am holding no public meetings, nor have done so in the last two years.

4.  I never believed in a “rigidly disciplined dictatorship” as “the most efficient form of human government.”  I believe in corporatism, wherein national classes, such as agriculture, labor, trade, fishing, etc., replacing political partis (even mine), elect their own representatives who choose among themselves their own ministers for representation in the government, and who in the House look after their own financial, economic, professional interests, thus allowing people more freedom, more initiative and more security than they are “enjoying” now or under the knout-rule1 of a few gangsters in the “workers’ paradise.”

5.  The men around me, whom you call “fanatical zealots who live to agitate, whose frustrations and resentments and dreams of future power,” are cool-headed people, not frustrated, having no resentments nor hatreds; they are good Canadians, law-abiding and orderly, who refuse to believe in the negative propaganda of those eternally against, be it religion, patriotism, tradition, property, family, in the propaganda of envy and jealousy, or destruction and revenge.

6.  Mr. Arcand, you note, is astute enough to range behind him all the more extreme advocates of separatism, playing upon the distorted grievances of French-Canadian Nationalists.  Yet, the Montreal Herald of November 012, 1947, gloated over the fact that Quebec Separatists were against the National Unity Party; the official organ of the Separatists, La Nation, anathematized me because our program made French Canadians empire-conscious, called for a “more immediate co-operation with the British Empire,” and for such the same paper called me an agent and stooge of the British Intelligence Service, a “man playing the game of English Freemasonry,” while at the same time the CCF Commonwealth wrote that I was an agent of … the Pope and financed with Vatican funds, while L’Autorité Nouvelle made me an agent of the Mikado, the Clarion of Fred Rose made me an agent and spy of Mussolini, and the Canadian Jewish Congress boasted of “identifying Arcand in the public mind with the sinister forces of German Naziism.”

7.  You find it disquieting that “a recent Arcand rally was held in a church hall, with anti-Semitic speeches.”  It was not a political rally and it was not held in a church hall, but an anniversary private gathering held in a hall located two blocks away from any church and belonging to the Corporation of the parishioners of St. Stanislaus.  As to my “anti-Semitic” speech, it consisted in anti-Gentile quotations extracted from Jewish authors. … To Jewish threats and plots against the Gentile culture and way of life, I answered that we Gentiles must all unite and see to it that we can frustrate the conspiracy.  If there is anti-Semitism in it all, well!  Gentiles did not start it.  And if Jews have a right in opposing unjustified anti-Semitism, Gentiles have an equal right to oppose anti-Gentilism in action, whether under the form of financial, economic, revolutionary, terror or smear oppression.

8.  You claim that the best way to combat my “menace” is by exposing my doings and ideas in the open.  It is exactly with the purpose of helping you do so that I am addressing this letter to you.

ADRIEN ARCAND.
Lanoraie, Que.

__________

1.  Knout:  a whip used to inflict punishment, often causing death.
2.  The first digit of the day in the date of the issue of the Montreal Herald is whited out in the news clipping.  Only the second digit appears, the “1”.

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