From: thood@corvus.matrox.com (Thomas Hood)
Newsgroups: can.politics
Subject: Re: L'invention d'une minorite
Date: 7 Sep 92 09:01:42 GMT
Organization: Matrox Ltd.

Legault has a totally preconceived idea of Quebec compared with which all
of history is judged inadequate, unjust, and replete with (English-speaking)
monsters.

Her scientific voice is the thinnest of disguises for an anti-anglophone
diatribe written in retaliation against Mordecai Richler.  She lacks
all objectivity.  Just as an example, she heaps scorn on Richler for
accepting a fee for his New Yorker article, without indicating anywhere
that her book royalties will be donated to charities.

Disguising collective as individual rights
------------------------------------------

Given the definition of collective rights:

   Rights claimed by an individual or individuals as members
   of a collective or in the name of a collective. [paraphrase, p.63]

she spends quite alot of time trying to show that anglophones have
"disguised" their fight for collective rights as individual rights.
In fact, although anglophones have always felt that they deserved some
sort of special status as an anglophone minority in a bilingual country,
the legal undertakings of individual businessmen were totally independent
of this and totally forthright.  The sign law denies BOTH individual
rights (my rights as a private citizen) AND collective rights (the
right of an established minority to not be hidden from view).

Her aim is to demonstrate duplicity on the part of anglophones.
What she does demonstrate is her own pathetic dilettantism in
political philosophy.

Refusal of minority status
--------------------------

She portrays a refusal.  Given her preconceived idea of the role a
minority should play (an auxiliary role, to say the least), she finds
this refusal to be everything from arrogant to deviant.  Does she
really think that anglophones are going to dissolve their society,
to become marginal in her own? -- I've never even ridden an all-terrain
vehicle!

Reaction / radicalization
-------------------------

Here I agree with Legault and find her incisive.  No doubt her "numerous
hours of 'virile' discussion" with fellow separatist Gary Caldwell gave
her some inside dirt.

I totally agree that anglophones have only reacted to events, not
acted upon them, or adjusted to them.  This has been enormously costly.
The continuing innocence and ignorance of the anglophones has ended up
offending the francophone majority, and has caused the demoralization
which is at the root of the exodus of young people, now unfortunately
so far advanced that I wonder whether or not this debate is purely
academic.

Reed Scowen is one of the first anglo-Quebecers to move beyond the debate
about rights, where anglophones are at the mercy of a more or less hostile
majority, to a debate about the strengths of the English culture.  He
says that the English must simply assert their culture as individuals,
by speaking English and demanding English services, while acknowledging
the predominance of French in Quebec and mastering the French language.

To Legault, Scowen is a reincarnated Lord Durham (which is to say, the
antichrist).  Her defamation is the best recommendation I can think of
for his book "A Different Vision."

I'll discuss that book in another article.

--
Thomas Hood                                                    thood@matrox.com
Montreal
Newsgroups: can.politics