Yves Engler

I picked this up after a bizarre banana republic moment in the Canadian parliament last October when they trotted out a 98 year old Ukrainian war hero, as a young whippersnapper he heroically fought against Putin and resisted the Russians way back in World War 2 . . . whoa, that would have him siding with the Nazis against the Allies. Wow, that’s ridiculous even for Canadian politics.

As is, the book has two major chapters from Engler’s wheelhouse and a lot of smallish résumés in other areas tacked on; which ultimately makes the book feel kind of inorganic and not fleshed out. I did like how he highlighted the courageous moral outrage when a free speech advocate is sentenced to 5 years in prison in an “official enemy state” and the deafening yawns of silence when police in the avuncular dictatorships use live ammunition on demonstrators or mass decapitations in freaky fundamentalist states that barely rate an official mention; no doubt aided by the oligarchic media with deliberate under reporting or omission.

Thanks to a helpful footnote, the author reveals the origins of the specific editorial slant of the book and the possible primer on the subject: Martin Lukacs: The Trudeau formula: education and betrayal in the age of discontent.… (mer)