Of Patriots, physicians and political poltroons...
By Bill Annett
Dissident Voice
February 19th, 2013
And even madmen manage to convey
Unwelcome truths in lonely gibberish.
— W.H. Auden
Norman Bethune was born into a Scottish-Canadian family in the small Ontario town of Gravenhurst, his forebears largely medical practitioners and/or Presbyterians. He attended the University of Toronto, eventually earning a degree in medicine, practised medicine in Montreal, and was apparently a highly innovative physician, since his design of the Bethune Shears for chopping open the rib cage is still used today, 75 years later. That’s the good part, viewed from a contemporary Conservative – or conservative – point of view.
However, interspersed with that classic Canadiana, he (1) interrupted his studies to be a stretcher-bearer – shrapnel-wounded – in the War to end all wars, (2) joined the Communist Party of Canada in 1935, (3) took part in the Spanish Civil War in 1936, along with other good-guy Communists like Ernest Hemingway and the English poets of the time, where he (4) devised a revolutionary system for supplying blood transfusion close to the front, thereby saving many lives, (5) in 1938 he joined Mao-Zedong’s (or whatever the current spelling is) Army contra both the Japanese invaders and the Chiang Kai-shek capitalists and, as a result, (6) he became a Chinese super-hero, patron saint and revolutionary icon. The greatest living Canadian example of a prophet who (because he was largely ignored back home) was not without honor, save in his own country. He died, almost unnecessarily, from an accidental scalpel cut on his finger during battlefield surgery, and the ensuing blood poison, occurring in less than clinical conditions. To say that he was buried in China with full military honors would be a gross understatement. He is enshrined in that country with all the national pomp, ceremony and prestige normally reserved for warlords, emperors, ancient dynasty members and contemporary members of the Politburo.